Career Reality Quotes

After Leaving Las Vegas I did assume that things would get a lot easier than they've been. But it's just been a mirror of the way my career's been from the beginning, so for it to have changed would have been strange. My career has never been perfect.

You know, you want everything you do, obviously, to be a success critically and commercially. But what you find out as you go along is that everything won't.

There's, what, 300 films at the Telluride or Toronto or something. How many are those people gonna see? How many of those are actually gonna be in a theater, you know? You know, as an actor, I mean, I learned a long time ago that the fulfillment in this business is the doing of it because you can't rely on anything coming out.

You get the reality checks during the course of your adult life and your career, and you realize that as good as the money in boxing is, most of the time people most don't make Ray Leonard or Oscar De La Hoya money, even if you make very good money.

I was known for being a bit of a clown. I remember my dad got me aside and said, "Just remember, everybody likes a clown, but nobody pays him." I've often been tempted to call him and say, "Remember how you told me...?" "Yeah?" "Yes, they do."

If you think having a tech job is the answer to all your problems, think again.

I love architecture, but I learned early on that architects just don't make a lot of money.

I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.

I wanted to be in the police force, a teacher, a judge, lawyer, doctor, and other jobs. Of course, my mind changed as I started to face reality.

The acting life is different than I thought it would be. I love it - it's actually a lot less pressure than I thought it would be.

Whether you win or not, the night the Oscars are over, the curtain goes down and you go back to the grind. Period.

I'm not ever getting a Pulitzer prize and my books aren't on high school reading lists, but for better or worse I'm a working writer.

I had parents who were working actors, who did really well in their careers, but it was a living. So it was a reality for me growing up; it wasn't a fantasy. It wasn't sitting there going, "I want to be adored." It wasn't that at all. Not to say that the screams of fans aren't a smile-raiser, but that was never the pull for me.

Most entertainment careers aren't going to end in fame.

When divorces meant marriage no longer provided security for a lifetime, women adjusted by focusing on careers as empowerment. But when the sacrifice of a career met the sacrifices in a career, the fantasy of a career became the reality of trade-offs. Women developed career ambivalence.

What is so liberating about this whole business is when you see that, you know, big movies are going to come out, huge movies are going to come out, and then you see them up in Malibu in the little Triplex theater a week later, on the scratch negative, and you think...“This is show business. This is the great movie career. And it’s all finding it in the shoebox.”

I can't imagine why you would want to take your child to see what the career of a writer is like, because it mostly consists of sitting in a room typing, or going to the library and looking something up. Those are not exciting things to watch.

I was really surprised when I started working and realized that you're actually on your own, a lot of the time. It makes you really responsible, as an actor.

Anybody who has the illusion that you can have a career as long as I have and be a star is kidding themselves.

If the average jazz artist uses his head and at the outset of his career realizes he won't play as well at fifty as he does at twenty-five, he won't be in a line-up outside the Salvation Army when he's fifty.