Monique Lhuillier Quotes

When I said I no longer wanted to be a painter, that I wanted to be an actor, the first thing I did was get a stinking job in an insurance building.

I was always going to be a dancer - I drifted into acting.

I was a housepainter and a landscape nursery man, and all these various odd jobs I had, and started doing community theater.

I never wanted to be an engineer.

I wanted to be a car pinstriper, but there was nobody to teach me how to do it. So I said, 'Music's good too. I'll do that maybe, since I can't work out how to do this pinstriping.'

I didn't expect to become an artist. I was not comfortable going out on the road.

I started playing violin when I was six, so I thought I could be a professional. It wasn't until I was 15 when I got into acting classes and realized this was what I wanted to do.

Instead of becoming an engineer like my brother, I moved to New York to be an actor.

I wanted to be a lawyer. Then a journalist. Actually, I graduated from university as a journalist.

It was easy for me to leave acting for school, because I wasn't really in it as an adolescent for fulfilling reasons.

I ended up turning down a full scholarship of music at the conservatory to pay to go to cooking school.

I've always loved painting and drawing. I wish I'd developed it more and exhibited.

Truth be told, I didn't want to be on T.V. I was going to be a writer or producer or a director, and at the end of my sophomore year, my department chairman put me up for a job doing weekend weather in Syracuse, New York.

At one point when I was very young, when I was first starting out, I thought, 'Well, one day I'll be able to put all the music away and become a real comedian.' But then I realized there are amazing musical comedians out there, that musical comedy is probably something I'll always want to pursue.

I always say, 'I love producing, but directing is my passion,' and for a while, I had to produce to support my directing habit.

I love making movies, but I was ready to rationalize being only a mother if my career never got back on track.

I'd always loved writing, in the same way that I'd loved painting. I wouldn't have seen it as a career.

I did 'Degrassi' for five years in Toronto, and I made the decision to quit the show to go to theatre school, which a lot of people thought I was really crazy to do, but it was one of those major decisions in my life that I haven't regretted - hopefully I won't! I really wanted to go to school.

And I discovered after a couple years that I really didn't miss making movies.

I thought, 'I'll come back to New York. I worked for the 'Aspen Times' when I lived in Aspen. I'll work for the 'New York Times' when I live in New York.' It didn't work out that way.

I ended up being a businessman unwittingly. I wanted to be an academic; I wanted to be like Einstein.

When the opportunity to choreograph came up, it was nothing more in my head but an opportunity. Then it suddenly became a career very quickly.

I never really considered acting as a career. I kind of fell into it. Originally, I wanted to be a painter.

I wanted to be a lawyer. I realized I don't really want to be a lawyer. I want to play a lawyer. Thank God I figured that out.

It's the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, 'Should I go back to university and get a law degree?' I kind of looked around me and thought, 'What kind of idiot am I that I've just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I'm pretty much where I was when I was 28.'