Quotes About Success

TV kind of worked out naturally for me. I was fortunate to do a show like 'Breaking Bad' and then go straight into something like 'Friday Night Lights.' It's not something I focus on, but when they're great projects, I can't pass them up.

Maybe I wasn't just the traditional-type person or whatever. I got to the top, but I got there maybe unconventionally. It wasn't just a straight line.

That's the whole point of my trying to achieve success in mainstream pop - to have straight people sing to my music that has a 'she' pronoun in it.

I couldn't have accomplished the things in my career if I didn't practice, and the worst part about that whole thing is when a kid comes up to me and says 'Allen, I don't like practice, either.' I've got to straighten that kid right then.

My motivation is being the best. Pretty simple and straightforward.

I think it's actually more difficult to come to a club where everything is going great and everyone is happy. When you take over from a guy who has been sacked because things weren't going well, it's more straightforward.

When you're younger, the mental strain of being a successful actor, jumping from role to role, and trying to have some kind of personal life, can really be terrible.

The quick success was a bit strange to get used to.

I've thought a lot about success, because it's very strange to me that I've been successful.

I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

It is strange, but nobody is shocked when pop singers make a fortune in the space of two years.

I was at number one in Australia with both my album and my single. And then I was told I had cancer. I thought, 'What a strange turn of events.'

I had a very strange career. I mean I went from playing to 150,000 people in 1983/84. Three or four years later I was playing to four people, you know, in Melbourne. I thought - bit strange, you know bit odd, bit erratic.

The strange thing is that since I've been offered lots of films I think that maybe they think that I've sold out to Hollywood. Which is not the case if anybody's listening.

The strange thing about the Olympics is that delivering on your potential is always quite difficult.

A strange thing happens when Spielberg discusses his own work. His degree of self-criticism seems a direct reflection of each film's box-office performance. You will not catch him complaining that the audience 'didn't get' a film; if it didn't do well, it generally didn't deserve to.

My professional life, in a strange way, has always been going up, up, up, while my personal life was just the complete opposite.

We've always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We're actually strangely consistent in that respect.

When you're getting to do what you want to do, you just assume you're going to hit a point where someone is like, 'No, you can't do that.' Strangely, that never happened.

It's not always about working with the hottest artist. I sometimes go for challenges although people look at me strangely like, 'Why are you doing that?!' However, with a risk sometimes comes a huge reward. It's about having the vision to be able to turn a challenge into something, and then you win the Heisman.

I had this incredible opportunity with 'Stranger Things,' and now all it tells me is that people like my work, so I need to keep working. I need to push forward and put as much of my heart into every character I play as I did into Barb.

I can't imagine finding success and then moving to a building in Manhattan with 300 strangers, like a bunch of little ants going home at night.

I'm really proud of 'Kissing Strangers.'

Well after 'Fast Car' was so huge, everyone was asking me, 'What's the next song?' At the time I just had ideas I was working on, but it was very clear I needed to finish another song ASAP, and that's how 'Perfect Strangers' came about.