Jay Gould Quotes

After 'The Real Thing,' I thought about giving up acting because it's difficult to have a rich life outside your work when you're an actress, a private life that can survive being picked up and put down. That's what I thought, anyway.

I'd like to settle down eventually, but acting is emotionally draining.

I soon realized that the best thing I could do for the profession of human services was to get out of it.

I think one of the things that happened to me in the last couple of years in the WWE where I realized how unhappy I was in that environment, was that I realized that I needed variety and balance in my life.

That is sort of the eternal question for people who go to Hollywood...what will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and forces you to think about doing something else? When do you throw in the towel?

You have to be able to do a bunch of things at once, and not think about things you're not doing while you're doing other things. You have to be disciplined about not trying to do everything, all at the same time. It's hard and fun.

I just decided that I didn't want to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn't active enough for me.

I'm not the "not-working" type. I derive pleasure from my work. Work gives me relaxation too. Every moment I am thinking of something new: making a new plan, new ways to work. In the same way that a scientist draws pleasure from long hours in the laboratory, I draw pleasure in governance, in doing new things and bringing people together. That pleasure is sufficient for me.

You have to discipline yourself and not carry the character with you. You need to switch it off and take time to re-energize.

'tis his honesty that brought upon him the character of a heretic.

If you're working at the factory and you're cursing every day that you get up, at all costs get out of it. You'll just make yourself ill.

If any of those times you rushed around madly - trying to get somewhere faster - had ever made any real difference in the quality of your life... don't you think you'd be able to slow down by now?

It often happens that those are the best people whose characters have been most injured by slanderers: as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been picking at.

When I'm not working, I think and I think when I get depressed.

The flight back and forth to LA has just started to feel like a commute, I think because all the jobs are jobs that I love doing so much, and it's such a great challenge to be holding on to all these different parts and to have to be in different mediums.

I took a fortnight off. But I'm not a great believer in breaks. I don't want to be rattling around inside my own head. I did feel I was spiralling into a Kathy Burke character and tried going out, but I prefer it here. Filming keeps me busy. It absorbs me.

It is easy for us to tarnish God's character because He never argues back; He never tries to defend or vindicate himself.

I think the level of criticism you're under is never healthy. I think that's why lots of people in Hollywood end up in rehab. There are the ups and downs. I was never a fan of the attention.

I still feel needles in my back when I think about all the horrible disasters that would have befallen me if I had permanently moved to San Francisco and rented a big house, joined the company dole, become national-affairs editor for some upstart magazine—that was the plan around 1967. But that would have meant going to work on a regular basis, like nine to five, with an office—I had to pull out.

It's definitely hard, it's hard to get into a Monday, it's much easier to work through a weekend and accomplish a lot, but I don't think that's the healthiest way to live.

I think the idea of getting out of a traffic jam and getting out of work each week and going and doing all this stuff would be really exhausting.

Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide. . . . Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.

I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.

I am acquainted with a wife and mother who is chained securely at the present time to a life-style of murmuring and criticism. She is the first to point out faults in her husband or to repeat neighborhood gossip. How damaging is a habit that permits fault-finding, character assassination, and the sharing of malicious rumors! Gossip and caustic comments often create chains of contention. These chains may appear to be very small, but what misery and woe they can cause!