Quotes About Career

I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history.

You know, I just tend to grow my beard out for 'Parks and Rec.' As an actor it's always easier to shave or cut your hair for a role, but it's hard to put fake hair on or grow hair for a role. When you look at pictures of me, the longer my hair is, the longer my facial hair is, that's just the longer I haven't gotten a job.

I've done my best to avoid B pictures.

I began my career creating art for an animated feature film, and it has been a life-long dream to tell some of the story of my own life - the story behind my art - through the medium of motion pictures.

30 years and 55 pictures - not more than five that were any good, or any good for me.

I went there and helped him shuffle pictures of people, and one of the agents asked me if I was interested in acting. Of course, I was a little bit interested in it; I'm sure that's part of the reason I moved to L.A. even though I never admitted it to myself.

If I didn't ever model? I would be back in Kansas. I would probably end up being a pastry chef. My grandma taught me how to make a pie.

Ever since the first 'American Pie,' I've always been happy to just have an opportunity, I just didn't think it was going to be with comedies. Now I really like it.

I wanted to be in the FBI. I also wanted to be a pie salesman.

I've been a freelancer my entire career, and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things, whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything.

Maybe you don't work for seven months a year, but you'll work again. It may be a piece of garbage, so you wear hip boots.

When the 'Guardian' is commissioning writers to write obituary pieces about you and your career... it doesn't get much nastier than that. And you've just got to go, 'It doesn't actually matter.'

Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.

I know we don't all follow in the family footsteps, but you are, I suppose, more likely to consider becoming a butcher if you have spent your childhood watching a parent debone a pig.

When actors get pigeonholed, that's their own doing to a large degree. Because if you do something that people like, obviously they're going to ask you to do it again. It's up to you to say no. If you're that insecure about working, you'll probably do what you're known to do.

A lot of people get pigeonholed because it makes it easier to understand them - or assume you understand them. I think the way you break away from that is by constantly doing different jobs.

The cool thing about being different in this industry is that you get different roles; you aren't pigeonholed the same way.

It's beyond my control who's going to cast me or how you're going to pigeonholed, so for me, it's just I want to keep doing different things because I want to get better, so hopefully I'll be hired to do them.

I think any actor in their right mind is afraid of getting pigeonholed.

After 'Radio Flyer,' to this day, every family-oriented script or script with kid actors comes across my desk. That's just Hollywood: you get pigeonholed, and it's both a blessing and a curse, but you live with it.

I think I was pigeonholed pretty early on. And I started late in my career. I was 33.

I'm lucky because I have never been pigeonholed and the roles have kept on coming.

If I'm pigeonholed, it's that people think I play sweet-natured ne'er-do-wells. There are worse fates than that in Hollywood.

I'm still fighting for parts - it's not like I'm sitting with a big pile of scripts putting them in a 'yes' and 'no' pile.