Professional Dissatisfaction Quotes

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college.

I resigned because the government failed to implement all my plans.

If you're a filmmaker, and every time you finish a film, you just naturally go, 'Oh, I could have done so much better,' that's not much fun, is it, really? You might as well go pick another profession if that really is how you derive satisfaction from it.

People talk to you and they try to convince you that they like what they do just because it sucks less than what they used to do... which sucked a lot.

1 out of 3 Americans says, "I hate my job." 80-plus percent say, "I'm ill-equipped and unenthused about my work."

Acting ceases to be work because I enjoy it. But it feels like working when I do bad work, especially when I know it is bad.

I loved the travel but I didn't love the work. I mean, come on, modelling is only so stimulating!

I would gather information and have to give it to somebody else and not get the byline.

The reason I quit fashion was that I had had enough of spending time always being on my knees, making other people look amazing and fabulous. I used fashion to express myself as much as I could. But at some point it was not enough

I think I made the wrong career choice

I've never disguised the fact that I wasn't happy in teaching. But the reason was that I wanted to do comedy. I would have been a very unhappy security guard or a very unhappy greengrocer.

I didn't like law. Every client had a problem, and I didn't want to listen to people's problems; I had enough of my own.

After getting a law degree, I spent five unhappy months as a corporate attorney.

Nothing could be more restrictive than working with people in advertising.

... anybody with the brains and energy to become a teacher ought to want to become something better.

I guess it was the first time I really thought about leaving. I don't just mean Iron Maiden, I mean quitting music altogether. I just thought, 'Nothing is worth feeling like this for.' I began to feel like I was a piece of machinery, like I was part of the lighting rig.

There were points when I've thought about getting into landscape gardening or getting back to illustrating, but mostly with a bit of a chip on my shoulder.

Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.

Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.

I would go to work on the show and I felt awful every day, that's not the way it was. ... I felt like some kind of prostitute or something. If I feel so bad, why keep on showing up to this place? I'm going to Africa. The hardest thing to do is to be true to yourself, especially when everybody is watching.

If you're an actor in your heart, no matter how much money they shove at you, it doesn't matter if the work doesn't provide that creative spark. You want out.

On a personal note, a legacy he left me, aside from being a friend who was important to me on many levels, was that the decades I knew Sam [Fuller] happened to be the decades that were his least happy professionally.

Whenever I work, I'm never really happy. I'm always second-guessing.

To be fair, I don't think it's a plague to say I have the misfortune of making movies for a living.