Donald McCaig Quotes

I didn't have the equipment for the regular world of being a lawyer. I didn't have the imagination for that. I did have a funny kind of ambition, but I didn't know where to put it.

I wanted to be an academic when I was 19 or 20. But, I've gone off that idea. The lifestyle is kind of lonely and isolated. I don't think that would suit me.

People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.

Guilt's too strong a word, but there is this niggling worry that I'm a grown-up doing a childish job and it would be nice to do something more useful and to reach a number of people with an idea you think is important.

Earlier in my career, I was really tight, really together, and knew who I was and I was confident. I kind of feel in between now.

I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.

At times, I think of my career as a map. The closer you get to the map, the more you know where you are, but the closer I get to my career, the less happy I feel. At the same time, I have carved out the career for myself which I wanted.

I see my face in the mirror, and I said, 'No, my ambition is not to be an actor.'

I always keep thinking, 'The next role - that's going to be the one that's really going to define me and show them all. I'll transform and disappear, and it will be a revelation.'

McEnroe has got to sit down and work out where he stands.

Well I could have been just a writer. I had been a hair dresser. I could have stuck with that.

I think, ultimately, looking back now, acting wasn't satisfying me 100%.

I don't think I'm bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.

I've done many ads because that's my new career. It's an inspiring extension for my mind.

I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

I got my Bachelor's degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, 'This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside. I'm a writer.'

I've worked for a long time, but I got to the point where I felt like, I am out here so far, how do I get back? I want to have a real life, a personal life. I didn't want a personal life I just visited.

When I wasn't working I didn't know what to do with myself and sort of didn't exist, in a way, when I wasn't working, so I was like two different people. I am not like that anymore.

On some planet, I probably could have been a lawyer. On some planet, I could have been somebody in advertising.

As an academic, this was not the lifestyle I had planned for myself. Now I see myself everywhere.

What I did for a living for so many years separated who I was from what I did.

My feeling was that I simply didn't have the enthusiasm to do reinvention.

At one point, I quit acting for a little bit to study psycholinguistics - somewhat a more practical career. It just didn't feel right.

I did some good stuff over in the U.K., but I wasn't consistently working. For a while there, I was going, 'Do I really want to do this - should I go back to university?'

I always grapple with myself, from job to job, 'Is this going to make an impact in some way?'