Sandra Oh Quotes

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

I do love my work. As an actor, you live from job to job, though, and you have to be prepared for that.

Every actor fears unemployment - even me.

I'm fortunate that I'm employed. And if you're in show business, of course, every night you go to bed and go, oh my god, tomorrow I'll never, ever work again.

I never had trouble getting an agent. I went out and got my first couple roles, and literally within six months I never had to have another job other than acting.

There's a cumulative effect to getting good parts as a freelance actor, because you're only as good as your last job, and you have to keep going out and getting them. Unless you're part of the finance structure, by which I mean a bankable star, which I never was and never will be.

With acting, I always felt like I didn't have control of it. It was all about other people giving me a job.

I don't know so much about making it, because I think of myself as a working actor who's always got my eye on what's going to be the next job. I've been acting for 22 years, and I think there's something to be said for simply staying in the game.

I'm a working actor, so I do pretty much whatever comes along because it's my job.

Sure, I'd love to be on primetime, but if I'm blessed enough to be picked up by another soap, thank God! It's so hard out there. And when you're not working, you feel horrible. You don't know when you'll get the next job. You don't know how long the soap genre will be around. I want to help keep these shows on the air and keep everybody working!

Once I started working as a professional actor, it was like, 'Bye-bye waiting tables, bye-bye bartending, bye-bye all the cliched jobs actors do.' But after a year of not getting work, there's this really difficult conflict, like, 'Do I have to go back to being a waiter when people recognize me from a show?'

There are times in show business when you work so much you think you will pop your cork, and then suddenly you can't find any work.

I've been just like any other working actor, out there looking for stuff.

That's the insecurity with our job, because you never know where the next role is coming from. No matter how successful you are, there's always a fear of someone not wanting me to play something else.

Part of being an actor is never knowing where your next part is coming from.

As an actor, you always feel like you're not going to work again. You're always unsure about how things are going to work out, and you start thinking you're going to just fade off into the distance.

As an actor, your life is filled with so much uncertainty.

As an actor, your life is constant ups and downs. My friends and I joke that when a job ends and nothing is lined up, you have nothing to do for the rest of your life. You just ride that wave.

A month before I booked 'This Is Us,' I was like, 'Maybe I should move to Montreal and work in a coffee shop.'

After a two-year stint at Cheek by Jowl theatre company in London, I put all my energies into breaking into New York's theatre scene. It took me eight years to build enough to play lead roles.

Be it commercial or offbeat, I want to establish myself as an actress.

You need to be happy with or without an acting job.

Listen, when you're starting out you're trying to be as creative as possible about how you can use your skills as an actor to make money.

When I first started auditioning, I was so, dare I say, desperate and hungry for a job that I pretty much went out for anything my agents sent me with a few exceptions.

I'll just put it this way: I've struggled enough as a working actor - and, most of the times, a not working actor - to know that anytime you are working is a blessing.