Lynn Coady Quotes

I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn't end up really doing that in the end.

I began as a weatherman and I learned very quickly I wasn't very good at it.

I wasn't academically successful. And maybe I've spent a lot of my career trying to make up for that.

I didn't want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn't like it. I always wanted to do other things.

I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn't end up really doing that in the end. I thought I would be a teacher, but I didn't really think about it in any practical way.

Many feel discouraged because they have not measured up to their potential.

There's a part of me that wishes I had gone to school and gotten a business degree, because I almost wonder if that wouldn't be more helpful than my theater degree, in some ways.

After 2000 or so, I started to realize I wanted to be doing something else. I didn't want to be in front of a camera. I was frustrated. I didn't think I would stop acting, but I didn't want to be seen.

I got a journalism degree. I started doing journalism - I interned at 'Cosmopolitan' magazine in the 1970s, which probably wasn't the best place for me, and I spent six or nine months freelancing. Anyway, I wasn't that good at it.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

I did a law degree but was miserable the whole time. I was supposed to join a law firm in London but instead went to Oxford to do a master's in philosophy.

When I was 28 years old, I found myself in Schenectady, New York, where I discovered that it was possible for some people to make a good living as physicists.

I wanted to be a lawyer. Then a journalist. Actually, I graduated from university as a journalist.

I feel like my career has been a series of glowing obituaries.

I auditioned in Chicago for Juilliard and didn't get in. I was basically living in a back room of my parents' house, paying rent and not doing anything with my life. I'd like to say it was patriotic to join the Marines, but it was also that I was doing nothing honorable with my life and spending too much time at McDonald's.

It was easy for me to leave acting for school, because I wasn't really in it as an adolescent for fulfilling reasons.

I thought I wanted to be an electrical engineer, which I turned out to be. But I was always curious about other things too, and what if I got interested in history or the law?

Sometimes I feel like a has-been who never was.

At last, after completing year 12, I failed the great final examination, repeated the following year and failed again even more dismally than before. This was not an easy thing to do. My mates did the simple thing in the first place and mainly passed with honours and went on to have remarkably successful lives.

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

I've made a lot of career mistakes. A lot. Actually, a lot of personal ones, too.

I think that there were only two people in my high school that were comfortable there, and I think they are both pumping gas now.

When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.

I don't regret doing any of my films. All of them have been great learning experiences, and they have contributed to making me what I am today.