Quotes About Career

I think, from every actor I've ever spoken to, they say the biggest thing they regret from life is not finishing school.

Children often ask me, they say, 'Well, how do you become a fighter pilot, or how do you become an astronaut, or...?' And I say, 'Love what you're doing and do it very well.'

My whole career, only one person has stepped up to back me. All these people say they like your films. They say this and they say that, but no one actually does anything.

There's no way that I could do a 9 to 5 job. There's no way. I was not cut out for that. You come in and you work for three months on the one job. They say, 'Great,' you know, and you're on to the next one - and you never even got fired. It's wonderful.

And I haven't met too many actors along the way that haven't told me how much the show has meant to them. It's one of the reasons they say they are doing what they're doing, today.

The most important thing is to talk to people that have jobs that you might like and to see what they say the job involves.

A film can be big or small - I have to just fall in love with it. To connect with the character, the script, and the director. Sometimes they say to you, 'You should do that for your career; it's a big thing, people will go and see it,' but I wouldn't be able to, because my heart wouldn't be in it. I would drive people quite mad.

I have always said to myself, 'I never want to say I'm leaving a job because I want to spend more time with my family.' I feel sorry for people when they say that. But my advice to them is that you shouldn't have taken the job in the first place.

The percentage of people that go to drama college in the U.K. is probably just like anywhere in the world. It's a very hard business to work in. They say that, at any one time, there's only 5% of actors in the world that are actually working and getting paid, which is a shocking percentage, really.

You know when people leave a job, and they say they didn't know what they came away with after two years? That's how I felt when I first left Google.

You can talk to someone relatively famous, and they say, 'What do you do? What do you do for a job?' and I say, 'I make documentaries for the BBC,' and you see their eyes just glaze over.

Coming from L.A. to D.C., I'm always impressed that in D.C., people are doing the things that the people in L.A. are pretending to do. Whenever I'm in D.C., I ask people what they do, and they say, 'I'm with the agency, or I'm with State.' In L.A., I ran into a guy who said, 'I'm working on an audition for a guy who happens to be with an agency.'

I never took my SAT's. I never applied to college. I moved right out here and jumped into the thick of things. Whether that was the smart move or not, I'm sitting here talking to you now, so it paid off.

My relationship with Twitter has evolved as my career has changed. The truth is unless you have a remarkably thick skin, as a creator, it's a very difficult place to be.

'Copper' is my first period piece. It's funny because I've been doing a lot of episodes of 'Elementary' with Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu; they keep bringing me back on the show, and so I go from being an outstanding black doctor to being a kind of hood, ex-car thief who went through rehab in 'Elementary.'

Terry Malick offered me three parts in 'The Thin Red Line.' I was busy shooting other movies while he asked me the first two.

I began working as a model because I was born thin. I didn't become thin to be a model.

Unfortunately, we're in a profession, and if you've got thin skin, you're not going to last very long. So you take the good with the bad.

I didn't foresee my career. Things happen.

I have millions of dollars, and I don't know finance. I've had some bad things happen in my career. I've got to educate myself. I sit down with my finance guy once a month and go over everything, line by line.

A lot of people who went to SC didn't play ball - people who do films, lawyers and doctors, people who do things in real estate and business. There's a lot of people that make things happen out here.

We go through our careers and things happen to us. Those experiences made me what I am.

I have never had a plan. Things happen to me, and, of course, I make friends who later say, 'Hey, you know who would be good for this? McKean would be good for this.' And they hire me, and if they like me, they hire me again, or the word gets out.

Being in this game nine years or whatever, you understand things happen. You can only control what you control, and that's on the court. You can't make front-office decisions and other stuff. You've just got to come out and do your job. You try to do it to the best of your ability.