Brian Jacques Quotes

I still pinch meself when I wake up of a morning. Who ever thought I'd be a children's author - let alone a best-selling children's author?

Pretty much everyday, there's a moment where I'm having to pinch myself and think, 'When did this happen to my life?'

Switching from one career to another can be scary, but it also can be a thrilling experience. Look at it as an opportunity to really go after what you want to accomplish in life and make a difference in the world. The key is to take small, conscious steps and prepare yourself for a successful transition.

Sometimes I wake up and think, 'How did I get here?'

I am astonished, when I pause to think about it, to discover myself to be an author of humorous novels for children. Or an author at all. I had a childhood much like everyone else's. What went wrong?

Some mornings you wake up and think, gee I look handsome today. Other days I think, what am I doing in the movies? I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift.

I had the closest thing I have ever had to an out-of-body experience lying in bed one morning. I turned on the 'Today' programme and item four on the news was: 'The shadow chancellor has ruled himself out of the leadership.' I lay there thinking that's interesting, then I realised it was me.

Yeah, I made it. It sneaks up on you. You're some schmuck and you wake up one day and you go, Good God, I'm the cheese.

I could describe my career in two words: who knew. I was on the path to becoming a professional baseball player, but I got injured in college. When I decided to move out to L.A. to try acting, nobody was betting on me, not even my family. But it's always been that way for me; nothing has come easy.

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

I wake up every morning and I surprise myself. I wake up to a new me.

I left family court for the vagaries of TV and said to myself, 'Judy, what the hell are you thinking?' It seems like only yesterday.

I never thought I would become an actress.

I was really young when I signed with Spinnin' Records, and the huge success of 'Animals' hit me by surprise. I didn't expect my life to turn like that at all. But it was a very welcome surprise, to say the least!

I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then

I never really thought I'd be successful. I never though I'd get books published, but this was something completely beyond me. The fact that it happened is wonderful, but it is not something that I was aiming for.

I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!

You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning.

I imagined a life that turned out to be pretty much exactly like the one I've had. That fascinates me endlessly. I wake up many mornings, and it almost wouldn't surprise me if I woke up from it and it was all a dream.

I went through a very hairy period. I had a movie where I was going to play Walt Whitman that fell through. At the time, I had grown this huge beard and very long hair. But then, the movie got canceled, I had some other parts, and I currently have very short hair. So, when I look in the mirror, I don't know who I am exactly. It's interesting.

I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart. Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at task's undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

I wondered how much of me would be left after tomorrow.

I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.

I am pretty sick with myself! It seemed a pretty good idea at the time. Around the time I turned 30, I started to feel very creative, more creative than I had been before which is good and I like that.

[And on going from character to leading actor] I don't approach anything differently; I just approach it as a character. I'm always astounded at the fact that I've ever played a leading character in anything [Laughs]. And my wife concurs with that, frankly. She always thought I would be, at best, the wacky neighbor on a sitcom, so this is all just a surprise and a joy.