Steve Carell Quotes

I had wanted to be a movie star and had thought I would be a movie star since I was very little. It was just something I saw in my future. But somehow when it happened, I wasn't ready for it.

Every actor wants to win an Oscar, full stop. It doesn't mean you try to design things around how to accomplish that because that's impossible.

Hollywood's never really been the ultimate goal for me.

If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.

I just wanted to be an actress. It never occurred to me that I could become famous, because I'm not one of those people who's automatically going to be the lead. I always saw myself as the mate.

You never think of being in that conversation for the triple crown. You don't even dream about that. It's a dumb dream. Get real.

Now, however, I see the folly of attempting to hitch one's wagon to a star with a harness that does not belong to it.

I guess I've never really had a great desire to be a leading lady, or be seen as an ingenue.

Working on 'Girls' opened up a lot of opportunity for me. It's like a dream job. It's a dream.

I have no aspiration whatsoever to be the next great leading man.

It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.

I wanted to star in a western opposite Robert Redford. That was my plan for my life.

I'm not trying to conquer Hollywood. I love my day job.

I knew since third grade I wanted to be Jim Carrey. His freedom, his goofiness, his crazy, loud, sudden energy. I told my family I was going to be a pediatrician, but in the back of my mind, I was like, 'Nope, I'm going to be the biggest movie star ever.'

When I was young, all I wanted to be was a movie star. At a certain point, I started to grow up and really care about what I did.

Being an action star is all I had ever hoped to be. I ultimately knew I would be an action star.

It's a big thing now: A lot of people want to be assistants to celebrities. If you're pursuing that, you're an idiot. You're a moron. The shortest distance between two points is not a celebrity, or being next to a celebrity.

My dream was never to become this unattainable star.

I can't imagine I'll be the new George Clooney. That's not really in the cards.

I've definitely had ideas and plans that sometimes exceed my means and capabilities.

I grew up in the Midwest; you don't know any screenwriters. It didn't seem like a realistic career possibility.

In all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles, blown in the air.

I'm sort of a delusional in the sense of, I was just gonna graduate from school and just, like, prance onto a film set and have a movie crew waiting for me to make my '8½' or something, which is completely insane.

It was total naivety that got me to Hollywood. I thought it was going to happen straight away. I told myself 'give it 5 years, there's no way I'll be here after that if it doesn't happen'. Cut to ten years later!

It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.