James May Quotes

Personally, I've never really wanted to be a rock star. That wasn't my motivation in life. It kind of happened.

Acting happened to me by chance. Even I'm surprised how a man from a small village, Belsand, in Gopalganj district has reached Bollywood.

I wasn't necessarily looking to do comedy on TV, but I don't think it's an accident that I ended up on 'Community.'

It's been real weird. It wasn't how I expected my life to turn out. Especially, mainly pertaining to the show. It never crossed my mind that one day I'm gonna be big and famous and have my own TV show, you know?

I wasn't really interested in doing television. I don't have that much ambition. My agent, Eileen Feldman, has all the ambition for me.

The fact that I'm on CNN today is something I never would have guessed as a 13-year-old - or any other age, for that matter.

I had never thought of my career as going in the direction that it did, as far as fan response was concerned.

Getting into television was a total fluke.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

I'm an accidental entrepreneur.

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.

For me, it was not destiny to make it to where I am now - I thought for a long- time I would become a go-kart mechanic, or a job like this, not an F1 driver.

I never thought I could model, and I certainly never thought about acting. It's just something that happened to me.

I didn't think I'd even know a president of the United States, let alone work in the White House. Even though my parents always said you can do whatever you want to do, I never dreamed of this kind of an opportunity.

I never had a plan to be a fiction writer. It's something that happened to me. Sometimes I think maybe it was my spectacular mid-life crisis. Some people buy expensive cars, and I wrote a novel.

The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess.

It fell into my lap. I grew up doing dance classes. And one day, a film production company contacted my dance school looking for background dancers. I wasn't looking for it. It just happened. And I found myself on set. And that was that.

I was on network TV for about 15 years or so, which I loved.

My career has been a level of serendipity all along. I've never planned anything out more than a few years. All the places we lived - the 12, 13 countries - and the companies I worked for were a combination of circumstances.

My every birthday wish was, 'I want to someday be on TV.'

My modeling career was really just a long accident - one that happened to coincide with my chocolate-cake phase.

It's not like I ever sat in my room and said I was going to start a media company and become an editor in chief. It was never my dream. It was something that just happened.

Obviously, I couldn't imagine that my career would go so well. When I first started, I wanted to play out of goal. But there was no goalkeeper, and the coach put me in goal.

You might call me an accidental entrepreneur.