Quotes About Rejection

Producer Michael Davies - who did 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' - offered me a TV show, but I turned it down. I wasn't negotiating: It just didn't sound like a good idea. Then he offered me another show, and I said, 'No thanks' again. When I heard about 'Win Ben Stein's Money,' I thought, 'OK, that sounds like a good idea.'

I had no ambition to go to America and be in a TV show. It's not like I've rejected something or decided that I've found something better. Your life just takes you off in strange and different directions.

It evolved out of the idea to make a kids TV show. And it actually turned out to be a bit dull and a bit regulated and too many people looking over your shoulder and it wasn't really.

I'm an actor, and I think some of us who are drawn to this work know what it is to desperately want to be loved and validated: to be good at something and not be able to do it; to come in second on countless projects; or told that you were the first choice, but the part went to that guy who had that TV show in the '90s.

I have 50 rejected TV show ideas. I think when I hit 100, then I'll feel like I really started to make it.

I could sell my own TV show, but I couldn't get it made.

I thought, 'As if I'm going to win a TV show, let alone get a record deal.' I'm going to go on TV with all these beautiful pop star-looking people? I'll never win.

The only people who do plays in LA are people who can't get jobs in TV shows.

One year, I did 10 or 11 pilots of TV shows that never went anywhere.

I tested on a lot of TV shows and films after I finished drama school.

We met, 'twas in a crowd, and I thought he would shun me.

I get tweets every single day going, like, 'I'm so glad you weren't on 'The X Factor.'

Twelve years on sets watching directors, I've taken a bit from everybody and rejected a lot.

If in my twenties I'd gotten one of the two-dozen roles that I did screen tests for and almost got, I think I would have become bored with the awards circuit, the whole hype machine.

You don't sit there at twenty-five, unpublished, inexperienced, and respond to Susan Sontag's editorial suggestions like a little snot, rejecting every one of them. But it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't admire Susan's own fiction.

The hardest thing which I've experienced is calling up my father, Rance Howard, who's a wonderful actor, and telling him I've had to cut him out of the movie, which I've had to do twice. That's a lump-in-the-throat phone call.

I can't tell you how many times I've booked an air ticket only to get to the airport and find out they killed my ticket because it goes into the system, and the program tosses a ticket that says 'fake' on it. Twice I've gone to the counter for a KLM flight through Northwest and have been rejected.

I was kicked out of The Stars And Stripes twice, and finally got back in.

I get offered movies probably twice a month and they are just generally bad.

I lost 'The X Factor,' and I lost 'Deal or No Deal' twice. I'm good at losing game shows.

'Beyond the Lights' took incredible fight to get made. Four years of writing and two years of overcoming 'no.' Every studio balked. Twice. But I kept fighting. What gave me the courage was 'Love & Basketball.' Every studio turned down that film, too. But I never gave up because I believed in it with my whole heart and soul.

The reality of the world we live in is that people sometimes aren't interested in many circumstances; no matter how much young radicals yell at them, that isn't what they want to do right now.

I don't know of an actor that the Coen brothers would come to and say, "Hey, I've got a movie for you to be in, if you want to do it," that would say, "No." That's the truth.

After you've done the first feature, then you have heck of a difficult time getting your second film off the ground. They look at your first film and they say, "Oh well, we don't want you anymore."