John Casey Quotes

Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.

I was 35, had always wanted to write novels, and thought that I had better do it while I was young enough.

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

I would have gone to law school, or gotten a psychology degree. I wasn't interested in sleeping on a futon forever. And what happened is I walked into auditions, and I had nothing to lose, because I had a backup plan.

People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.

I didn't want to go to college. I wanted to move to Los Angeles right out of high school.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.

I wanted to be a writer, to write these stories that would make people see the world in a different way. But I ended up going to business school because I thought I could ultimately get to where I wanted to go faster that way.

Hopefully, if I get enough of a fan army together, people will let me write fiction.

My sophomore English teacher encouraged me to write for the school paper, and that's what got me started. Suddenly it struck me that being a writer could be a romantic and adventurous position. Previously, I had thought I would be a tennis pro, giving lessons at a local club. I thought that would be a good life, and it might have been.

I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.

If I hadn't have fallen pregnant by my then-boyfriend, I would probably still be living in London doing the celebrity scene.

I was studying theater management, business stuff. About that time, I realized I really didn't like that, and it threw me into a panic attack a little bit. I was under the assumption that the first job you get out of college is the job you have for the rest of your life.

When you get to a certain age, you have to make a decision for yourself: if you want to get old in the industry, and you want to play maybe a few parts that come along now and then - or what else in life interests you?

I went off to Harvard Law School for six weeks, and then I said, 'Doggone this, it's not what I want to do.' I remember when I told my dad I was leaving law school, and I wanted to go into football. He said, 'Be a good coach.'

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

I won't be training at 60 years old, because I want to do something else in my life.

I started working at a time when most of my friends were still figuring their lives out.

I couldn't see playing for England at all. I had other goals at the time when I was a mortgage advisor and had different goals when I was playing non-league football.

I had liver disease. I'm completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer.

I never wanted to be an engineer.

I wanted to be an architect, fate took me to films. Now that I am into politics, I want to give my best here.

I was going to be a lawyer, and I had studied hard, but then it suddenly occurred to me in a very deep, profound way that I didn't want to keep practicing law for the rest of my life.

I'm one hundred percent into my life, and into my fighting career. This is who I want to be in the future - as a mother - and if I'm going to leave the sport, I leave the sport. When I finish with fighting, I'm done.

I couldn't wait to leave school. So I did it as soon as I possibly could at 16. I had no clue what I wanted to do next other than being at school wasn't it and that I was desperate to make my own way as soon as I could.