Unconventional Career Paths Quotes

I don't believe in having to show anybody anything. I just do my work. You know, making a living as an actor is such a rarity on earth. It's like making a living as a painter. So I look at different opportunities in the same way as Jack Nicholson, who said once, "Keep popping up in different holes. That's what you want to do: Just keep popping up in different holes." That made a lot of sense to me.

I always say 'Knocked Up' opened the doors, and 'Hangover' just burst it wide open. To this day, it's still surreal. And my wife's a doctor. All our friends are doctors - our close friends. And it's just that I have an odd job now. I think I'm like a doctor who had a detour, and I just have an odd job.

I come from a big family of hairdressers; they didn't read newspapers. I would say, 'I'm off to Afghanistan...' and they would say, 'Have fun!'

I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we're totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.

I mean, if President Reagan could be an actor and become a President, if Michael Douglas is your next choice, maybe I could become an actor. And I've got a good pension; I can work cheap, which is unusual around here.

Because my dad's Chinese-American, and they're very concrete, he said, 'There's no money to be made in literature.' So he told me to go into the sciences. And I was a good girl. And I did what Daddy said. And that's how I ended up being a doctor. But you know, you just can't stamp out that desire to tell stories.

I started selling corn dogs, ended up in the music industry. That's how it all started.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.

My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.

From an early age I didn't buy into the value systems of working hard in a nine-to-five job. I thought creativity, friendship and loyalty and pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable was much more interesting.

My interest is in turning over a rock and seeing what's underneath. It's a personality trait more than anything; it's what made me want to become a crime reporter, even though I was not suited for it personality-wise.

My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that's true of me, too.

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance.

When you're having a conversation with someone who, despite his brilliant medical career, says he's going to produce the film, you think, "How's he gonna do this? Is he insane, or is he really going to pull this off? It might be both." It's really amazing to see someone do what he's done.

It is so common in middle-class families to consider modelling and acting not serious.

It didn't matter what you look like. You don't have to get up at 5:30 in the morning and there's a lot to be said for that. Corpse Bride can just play all my parts from now on and I'll just do the voice.

There's something that sort of weirds me out about actors who want to be rock stars, and the other way around too.