Professional Frustration Quotes

Studios weren't banging on my door to offer me parts... And I thought, well how am I ever going to make movies that speak to my heart and to my values?

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.

I had come to the point when I realized it was unlikely that my film career was going to move beyond a certain level of role. And I was - because I had graphic instances of it - handicapped by the success of Star Trek. A director would say, 'I don't want Jean-Luc Picard in my movie' - and this was compounded by X-Men as well.

The out-of-work actor wears out more than shoe leather. The very sensibilities that make him an artist are shattered by the disregard he is shown as a human being.

I've been an assistant for seven years now and I haven't had one head coaching interview. I'm doing something wrong.

I'm unqualified for anything else. I'm barely qualified for this.

The great sadness of my life is that I never achieved the hour newscast, which would not have been twice as good as the half-hour newscast, but many times as good.

I shot a movie with Nicole Kidman that I got cut out of - it was crap anyways.

If you look at American medical fiction written by doctors, like 'The House of God' by Samuel Shem and 'The Blood of Strangers' by Frank Huyler, both have themes of cynicism and dysfunction running through them that you won't find in 'ER.' You find it in 'Scrubs,' but because that's a comedy, it gets away with it.

That's really just the worst part of life really, you get bracketed somewhere and the next thing you know people are saying, 'No. No. That's not the type. Get me so and so.' I'm not a type. I'm an actor.

That's kind of the nature of the profession I'm in. It's frustrating. Things don't go your way, and I was no exception, in that I spent many years struggling to get work, and there are a lot of people more talented than myself who got jobs before me. And I finally, after years and years and years, got lucky.

Being a teacher was great, but it wasn't what I wanted to do, so it was ultimately crushing.

I am the most successful unsuccessful actor in New York. And I guess with that, maybe apparent only to myself, there started to be a very subtle but unmistakable whiff of entitlement, bitterness, jealousy. I was not respecting the work.

When I started in fashion, for the first 10 years, I said to myself every day, 'I'm going to quit tomorrow.'

I remember that when I was in my 30s, a hot age for an actress, lots of offers were coming in, but nothing was great, and I didn't work for 18 months. It was at a really fruitful age, and I wanted to work. There was nothing coming down the pipeline that I thought was good - and then I got 'The Piano.'

I seem to be constantly confronted by theater professionals who are more or less annoyed by the prospect of structure.

I resented that my career wasn't going the way that it was supposed to. And I was angry that I wasn't getting the parts that I wanted.

The irony of a director going to film festivals is you never get to see any of the films.

I am tired of being in an industry that doesn't appreciate me.

Law practice is the exact opposite of sex:even when it's good, it's bad.

My career is a burden, but I can't just fade out like a pathetic sore loser. More often than not, I'm just making a fool of myself for the hundredth time, and that wasn't part of the plan, initially. I'd be happier not having any kind of public presence whatsoever and just hiding behind the sleeves of the CD.

It become totally untenable to me that after acting for 25 years - I've played Juliet, Cleopatra and Anne Frank - there I was, sitting in Hollywood, just waiting for somebody to want me.

Of course, I would like to play the guy next door, but nobody's going to hire me for that kind of role.

I've got splinters in my nose from the best publishing doors in town.

I feel pretty used by the music industry, in that my contracts are written in such a way that I don't get paid. And that makes me wanna quit working for whoever thinks it is that I work for them. But I've clearly got a job that I can't quit.