Amaal Mallik Quotes

In school, all my teachers and my mum were super routing for me to study at Oxford. I picked music as a career choice, and this didn't sit too well with them!

Coming from a family who put a lot of emphasis on academics, I always thought I was going to be a lawyer.

Being from a very traditional Chinese-American family, my parents believed the only options to have a successful life were to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or a business person.

My dad wanted me to go down a more academic route. He is very much about sticking to the rule book and sticking to the blueprint of a successful career.

I know I haven't been the greatest student, but I do intend to get my degree. Otherwise, my mother will kill me.

I was pre-med at Glasgow University. I was from a family who were of the mind that if you were clever enough to be a doctor or a lawyer, why wouldn't you be?

Actually, I wanted to be a musician, either a guitarist or a drummer. I guess my dreams were in the entertainment industry, and I landed somewhere along there.

My parents from a very young age raised my sister and I under a pressure to achieve. They're both attorneys. So good marks, getting through university, there was a huge emphasis and pressure to do well and keep going.

My mother wanted me to be a professor, because I have several people in my family who are professors at university.

I grew up in Adelaide, Australia. No one in my family had finished high school, and I was smart at mathematics, so I became an academic and got my Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. I didn't set out to be a businessperson.

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.

I think my parents were happy that I'd gone to university and gotten a degree in history so they thought, 'Well if acting doesn't work for him, he can always become a history teacher or something.' Fortunately, the acting worked out.

I'm from a family of teachers. My father would drown me in the bathtub if my daughter didn't graduate from college. I don't care who she is or what she does. Just get the diploma.

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.

My dad, coming from a very traditional family, always wanted me to be a doctor. So he would always ask me, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' And I'd have to say 'Dr. Chen.'

My mom is the type of mom who wonders why I haven't used my psychology degree to become a successful clinical psychologist.

I was always kind of a school person - my parents were teachers, and my grandparents were immigrants, so their big thing was, 'Go to college, go to college, go to college.'

Your parents would not be happy if you came home and said you wanted to grow up to be a chef or a rock star.

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

Both of my parents are professors and everyone in my family has some fabulous degree of something or another and I couldn't get into college because I didn't know a language.

I never really paid attention to sports, which, coming from the mecca of football in Texas, is kind of odd. I played sports, but I was nerdy. Having a single mother, the pressure was on me to get good grades and a scholarship and go to college.

Dad and mom would have preferred that I be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or a great humanitarian.

College didn't stick, so I worked odd jobs, but I've always written songs and played music. I actually met a guy who was a songwriter, which I didn't realize was a real job.

My parents themselves both went to university, and they very much expected me to be an intellectual and go through further education, and it's to kind of their surprise that I became an athlete.