Quotes About Struggle

I was writing short films and I was going through this really, really, really terrible end of a relationship that I didn't want to be going through. It was too much for me to process and all of a sudden I had this idea for my first feature film and I knew right away I had to start writing it.

I had no idea what it took to be an actor. Then all of a sudden I found myself cast in a TV drama. The director was very harsh with me. One time, he told me this would be my first and last acting job. I seriously thought that acting was not the right career for me.

All of a sudden I'm an actor, and I spend a decade trying to fit in and realising that I didn't, really. Sometimes in the right circumstances, with the right people, it felt OK. But other times it was a bit more jobbing. I didn't fit the mould, somehow.

Three years is a lifetime in Hollywood. If your career starts slipping in L.A., you can really feel it. All of a sudden, the people that you were beating for a part start beating you.

My parents came from very humble families. My grandfather had a construction business coming from farmland, and my grandmother could never read or write. We were very spoiled. We had a nice house - and then, all of a sudden, we had nothing.

I was so successful in Cleveland, and we moved to Los Angeles, and there was nothing for me to do. All of a sudden, from being a success, I was a has-been at 13.

Boxing was a way to express my anger. All of a sudden, I was expressing anger, and I was good at it. I was like a Jekyll and Hyde. Boxing helped me because I was fighting the anger out. I was knocking guys out.

I always felt second best. I was never the prettiest, never the skinniest, never the fastest in my sports. Never the smartest, because I have dyslexia. Then, all of a sudden, people were like, 'You're gorgeous.' And I was like, 'What?'

When I was just 13, we went from being middle class to lower middle class and finally lower class, as someone close to my father took away everything he had, including his property. All of a sudden, I started working at the age of 13.

There was a time when no one wanted me, and then, all of a sudden, I am working like crazy. It's insane.

I've struggled a lot in my life with feeling like a failure. I lived in a 'prison of perfectionism,' holding myself to a standard I couldn't possibly live up to. Then I became a mom, and all of a sudden, there arose even more opportunities for failure.

Ever since I became better acquainted with classical music, I've wanted to try my hand at longer forms, but I could never really see my way to it. And after I got divorced, all of a sudden I had a lot of pent-up energy and lots of stuff that had gone into trying to make this failing relationship work that kind of got reapplied.

That's the nature of the business. You can have a hit and then nothing happens all of a sudden. But I don't resent it. Hits don't make great artists.

I'm always like this after fights - I can't sleep, I'm only getting a couple of hours a night for three or four days then all of a sudden I'm wiped out for a full night where I don't even move.

To all of a sudden go from feeling almost invincible to being temporarily paralyzed to then having rods and screws in my neck and not really being able to move around to seeing my body change, I definitely, definitely, definitely did not feel myself at all.

But the thing about grief is that it doesnt have a timescale. So I can sit here today and say to you that its got easier in some ways, and then all of a sudden itll just hit you so hard all over again, and you dont know where it comes from.

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself.

When you suddenly become successful, the change is enormous, both financially and in terms of recognition and the way people treat you. I found that hard to deal with. I got very guilty about it, and I think I put up obstacles to prevent myself enjoying it.

I had done a couple of plays, but I was a clueless boob. 'Cosby' allowed me to have something on my resume that was real and then the producers of 'Guiding Light' let me play a preppy killer just the following month. Suddenly I had two gigs on my resume that made me look like a real actor, although I was far from it.

It took me a good decade of hiding in my house and not going outside to even, like, get my arms around this idea of celebrity, where suddenly people are looking for you to pick your nose or get a shot of you kissing some woman. It's a very discombobulating thing.

When resources become skimpy, human beings don't suddenly cooperate to conserve what's left. They fight to the last scrap for possession of a diminishing resource.

I remember June 8, 1972. I saw the airplane. And it's so loud, so close to me. Suddenly, the fire everywhere around me. The fire burned off my clothes. And I saw my arm got burned with the fire. I thought, oh, my goodness, I get burned. People will see me different way.

Sometimes when I am photographing a major news event, I am suddenly overwhelmed by helplessness.

When you suddenly appear on the scene and you are the new face, everything centers on you. I experienced this in my mid-20s and I found it rather hard.