Quotes About Self-made

I never thought of myself as a movie star. I'm just a working girl. A working girl who worked her way to the top - and never fell off.

I really started from grassroots, without a handout or anything.

And although they like to fancy themselves rugged individualists (better yet, the last of the rugged individualists), what they really are is a personality type that our society generates so predictably and in such great numbers that they almost constitute a viable market segment all on their own. One more thing about the backlash personality type: every single one of the bitter self-made men of my youth was a believer in the power of positive thinking.

In 1979 the bitter self-made men were hoarding gold and reading How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, a personal-finance best seller as recklessly gloomy as the best sellers of the nineties were senselessly optimistic.

One more thing about the backlash personality type: every single one of the bitter self-made men of my youth was a believer in the power of positive thinking. If you just had a sunny disposish and kept everlastingly at it, they thought, you were bound to succeed. The contradiction between their professed positiveness and their actual negativity about nearly everything never seemed to occur to them.

The swaggering personal habits of the bitter self-made men only confirmed my adolescent understanding of the social order. Riding a BMW motorcycle without a helmet, taking no shit from the police, drinking Wild Turkey at all hours of the day, carrying a .45 automatic tucked into their waistband—if that wasn't working class, what was?

I'm patient when it comes to my career, which is unlike me, but there are no stars in my eyes. I make where I go. It's that sort of thing.

I've made all my money on my own without my family and I work very hard.

I've always loved Houdini, not just because of what he did, but also because of what he stood for. He was a self-made man in a time when the idea of celebrity was still new, and he used his celebrity for good.

Los trabajos interesantes son los que creas tú.

I have inherited nothing. Everything Ann and I have we have earned the old-fashioned way.

He had that indefinable air which comes to young men who have had to make their way up from a ten-dollar start.

The more readily we make household names and the more numerous they become, the less are they worthy of our admiration... We can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero. In a now-almost-forgotten sense, all heroes are self-made.

Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it.

he wasn't a failure. He made for himself a world fit for himself to live in.

Some men are self-made, but most are the revised work of a wife and children.

There's no such thing as a self-made man. I've had much help and have found that if you are willing to work, many people are willing to help you.

If you are given a lot of money without having to work for it, you won't appreciate it as much as if you made it yourself.

When you're a self-made man, you start very early in life. In my case it was at 9 years old when I started bringing income into the family. You get a drive that's a little different, maybe a little stronger, than somebody who inherited.

There was a generation of people who moved here to make something of themselves. They had to really struggle and created really something on their own apart from a lot of attention. It was a really exciting time here.

Oprah is just this goddess presiding over so much of American life, and her story is really interesting - the way she made herself, and the ruthlessness it took, and also the fantasizing that it took.

Oprah is definitely a self-made woman and she came from being dirt poor, as did I.

I can bake. I made myself some nice French fries once. But otherwise I just eat out. Lots of salad bars.

We built a business for ourselves just out of hard work, and I think people really want to hear from us about that.