Phil Hartman Quotes

At 30 I thought my life was over. I thought I'd have made something of myself by then, that life would somehow have made the necessary arrangements - but actually I had nothing.

When I left college, I though that I would be immediately embraced by the film world and instead found myself sitting in a squat for three years not knowing what to do with my life.

I love the romcom. I thought I had a career playing the best friend. What happened to that? It's really sad to me.

I'm an actress but it's not fulfilling me in the way I thought it would.

Being a teacher was great, but it wasn't what I wanted to do, so it was ultimately crushing.

After 2000 or so, I started to realize I wanted to be doing something else. I didn't want to be in front of a camera. I was frustrated. I didn't think I would stop acting, but I didn't want to be seen.

I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?

Many a person who started out to conquer the world in shining army has ended up just getting along. The horse got tired, the army rusty. The goal was removed and unsure.

When our daughter was born, a light went on for me - there was more to life than what I was doing. It felt like being famous for being a paint salesman. It wasn't the dream I was sold on. I'd had enough of it.

Every day I realized I would not be a star.

I don't think any of us grew up into the world we were hoping for or expecting.

Oh, my career. What career? I'm over 40.

I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel - and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre.

I'm 47 years old, and I have to accept the fact that I'm probably not going to set the world on fire... If I was going to do that, I would have done it by now.

I'd hit thirty, I'd sort of failed as a musician, I'd failed as an artist I felt at the time.

After so many years of rejection, I felt acting would have to become a hobby rather than a full-time profession.

I had given up on acting because I would go for auditions every day, but nothing would happen.

I had moved across the country, taken internships, networked, worked long hours, and called in favors to get there. And I had done it. I was working in Hollywood. So imagine the melancholy I found myself in when I realized that I didn't love casting the way that I always thought I would.

I got the 'Stranger Things' script, like, a week before NBC canceled 'State of Affairs.' I really had this moment where I'm like, 'I'm done.' My neuroses is very sophisticated: I was like, 'I am done. Hollywood is done with David Harbour. They are finished.'

If you're doing a job, and you secretly want to do a different job, you start to blame the job. I was blaming the teaching for that fact I wasn't performing. I really felt I needed to follow a comedy career.

I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream...he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

The same sun which gilds all nature, and exhilarates the whole creation, does not shine upon disappointed ambition.

There never were any roles for my kind of acting. That's the story of my life.

When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.

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.