Mark Foster Quotes

Dropping the news to my parents that I was skipping my 'dream education' at Chalmers to sit at home recording videos while playing video games was not easy.

I just thought that I had had my fill for a while and wanted to have a family. My husband was moving to Chicago for his job. And so I went along. And it was a great thing that I did.

I've gotta be the only father begging his son to leave a six-figure job to go play in a rock n' roll band!

I literally came out of high school thinking that I was going to do something in the sports world because I grew up with a very sports-oriented family. My last year of school, I got involved with playing guitar and singing, and I joined a band and I just decided that year somehow that I was going to play music.

I moved to Los Angeles when I was about 20, all by myself. It was exciting. I had this moment when I felt like I needed to put on my big-boy pants and just make that leap to see what would happen.

I was 17 when I left the small Maine town where I'd grown up. I wanted to do something I thought was important with my life, so I headed to California and didn't look back.

When I was a senior, I got accepted into the Julliard School for Dance, but ultimately decided to move to L.A. to act, so that was a fun conversation with the parents. I truly have some of the greatest parents ever.

I moved to London to go to dance school when I was about 17, but then I realized that I didn't want to be a dancer anymore, so I dropped out after five or six weeks. All I wanted to do was sing and make music.

Yeah, I left Idaho at 17. You know, I graduated high school a year early and just, you know, the typical story, packed up my car and moved out.

After three years in Chicago, I decided to call it a career.

There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

The age of 18 seemed the right time to try something different in my life. Moving to the U.K. was a risk, and I was never confident that I could ever make a full-time living being a musician, but I had to try. Initially, I worked as a jazz musician in pubs or with bands.

I had to get out of the Boston area, so I flipped a coin and said, 'Heads - Miami, tails - California. I was in my mid-20s and came out here with no training. Acting wasn't even in my mind.

What I finally did in 1995 was I said, I'm going to get out of this town and I'm going to go out West.

Actually, I wanted to become a journalist, but no matter who I imagined myself to be in the future, somehow I was sure: I would leave my hometown. I felt it was my destiny.

I was very successful, and I graduated with honors. And then I called my dad, who still lives in London, and I said, 'Dad, thanks for college, but I'm going to go act now.' It didn't go over very well.

In 2006, I made the decision to go after my dream. I was living in Atlanta and had a promising career in marketing, but I took a leap of faith and decided to move to New York, enroll in graduate school, and pursue acting.

I begged my parents to let me go to LA for three months just to try it out. Three months turned into five years.

I was 25 when I'd told my parents that I was giving up steady work as an electrician to become an actor. They couldn't have been less enthusiastic if I'd proposed starting a commercial newt-breeding operation in the bathroom.

I am an engineer by profession, but I knew I wanted to act. My parents always encouraged me, and when my father shifted to Mumbai for work for a brief while, I came along.

I left Starbucks in 2015. When I was younger, I remember looking at Justin Bieber and wishing I had all these fans, but you know what? Everyone has their path, everyone's path is different, and this is where mine's going. I just didn't want to work at Starbucks. I wanted to be writing music all the time.

I remember studying so hard for so long and saying to my parents, 'I will be a teacher.' And they were looking at me like, 'Girl... you just want to be on stage. Stop pretending.' So when I chose to do music, they were relieved. My parents were more intelligent and lucid than I was.

Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately.

I always believed in the YouTube community and myself. I saw something there. The most difficult thing was others not believing in me. I had a lot of friends in Los Angeles who really thought I was crazy for leaving a steady acting job to start on YouTube.

It was a very big decision when I decided to leave B. Tech to come to Mumbai. But they were always supportive. At one point, I felt I shouldn't do it. My mother encouraged me then.