Michael McKean Quotes

Good things happen when you meet strangers.

It seems like the good things that have happened in my career are things that you don't try to plan and push, and make it happen, it just seems to happen.

The beauty about my career is that none of it was really calculated.

Talk to people no one else is talking to. Who would have thought that giving a speech at a funeral at age 12 would introduce me to a man who would introduce me to my first business contact who would introduce me to several other important people in my life. That's luck. That's randomness.

I drifted into acting, and I've drifted into my career, and I've never been guided by anything particularly concrete.

There are no mistakes, only happy accidents.

I still think my whole career was accidental. I didn't pursue it. I feel like I'm cheating sometimes.

I find that my entire life has come to me, and things happened without me planning them. You know, I never asked to photograph Princess Diana, and that made me more famous than I wanted. I never asked to photograph Madonna, and that pushed me to another level. There are things that just take you into the limelight.

Everything I've done I've just fallen into.

Getting into television was a total fluke.

I'm thankful for serendipitous moments in my life, where things could've gone the other way.

At one level, SXSW exemplifies serendipity, because whenever I come, I get these unexpected meetings with people I never knew existed, and you couldn't have planned it. But by making the choice to come to SXSW, I'm increasing the probability of those encounters.

I didn't foresee my career. Things happen.

Twitter wasn't planned. It just happened.

I wasn't classically trained as an actor; I wasn't pursuing standup comedy. I really came into it through the back door. And there was a benefit to that, I think, because I wasn't pressing; I wasn't pushing.

Things happen in weird, serendipitous ways.

I feel like some of the best roles that I've gotten to play I could've never preconceived. These things happen to you in an unexpected fashion, so it's hard to pre-imagine what that would be because some of the best opportunities I've had I could've never anticipated or expected.

Bollywood was never on my to-do list. It just happened.

I never planned to become a dancer, but I became one. The same thing happened with acting and direction. I remember I was doing the choreography of a film, and the producer came and offered me to direct the film. It was in Telugu, and that is how it started.

I always considered myself a songwriter, but I didn't move to New York with plans of doing that; it just sort of happened. Everyone thinks that I moved to New York strictly to play music, but I totally just happened to fall into playing with Woods, and it all got started from there. I just went to New York to hang out.

For me, music is a byproduct of this process - the human process - and the fact that I've managed to eke out a career with it is a happy accident more than any strategy.

If I look back, I think most of the things I did - the films, the books, the collaborations with these magazines - were mostly by accident.

I can't say that I wanted to be an actress, it just happened along the way. I did not even know that I would be doing modelling but that also just happened.

Nothing was planned in my career.

If you looked at my resume in the years leading up to Flickr, I worked in a dive shop in landlocked Arkansas; I was a starving artist. I just arrived at the thing I love to do accidentally.