Vinessa Shaw Quotes

I started out as a music teacher; I never planned on becoming an actress.

I've never wanted to be an actress. I came into the industry to be a filmmaker, but let us say fate had other plans for me. I don't want to be the next glamour queen.

I left my apartment in London and I sold everything. I literally had $1000 and a suitcase when I got on the plane. The next day I enrolled in my first acting class. We had some great people, Jim Carrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Molly Ringwald. It was very inspirational.

I went to a public high school with a magnet program for law and psychology. But right before my junior year, I decided that I wanted to leave and become an actress, so I graduated early and moved out to L.A.

I started studying at 26. Before that, I never thought of acting as something that I would ever try.

I don't regret giving up football for acting. I love football and am very proud I played for Morton. But the truth is, I wasn't going to get much higher in football. At the same time, I sensed I could go somewhere in acting. I'm 28, which is young for acting, whereas in football I'd now be near the end of my career.

Even though I played national level badminton, I told my parents when I was in 10th that I was not interested in continuing. Being a model or actor fascinated me from a young age, and I even did a couple of ads when I was just eight years old.

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

I originally envisioned myself doing something with the suffix 'ology' at the end of it, like marine biology or entomology. But after I started to do some acting gigs, I thought it wasn't a bad thing... I said to myself, 'I might as well keep riding this bus until the wheels fall off.'

I was playing a relatively high level of hockey, and I thought that's what I wanted to do. But I had my first movie audition, and I was hooked.

I was in a band till I was about 17; then I went to television, and I spent seven years doing that. When I came to Seattle, I started to audition for things. The passion's always there, and that's what's been the hard thing: to fit that passion into a normal life. You can't do it. You can't have a normal life and pursue this dream.

I followed a girl I met in Japan to Los Angeles and ended up working in a motorcycle store. I quit the job one night, went to a party in the Hollywood Hills and ended up yelling at a bunch of people. Someone saw me yelling and asked me to be in a play. The first night, there was an agent in the audience who took me on and sent me out for jobs.

I wanted to play professional hockey, man. But when I acted, I thought, 'Well, okay, maybe I do have something here.'

I suddenly realized that the fellow who didn't show up was getting about fifty-times more money than I was getting. So I thought, 'this is silly,' and became an actor. I certainly never thought I'd wind up in motion pictures. That was far beyond anything I'd ever dreamed of.

To do the things that I did, I'm amazed that I had the audacity - like resigning from the Army and becoming a janitor and a songwriter.

At 17, I realized that it's going to be a tough decision to make, but I had the clarity of thought to walk out of cricket and try my luck in acting.

When I was doing engineering, one day I thought that I want to be an actor, and apart from acting, I want to produce also.

Basketball wasn't going particularly well, but in my senior year, I did a play and got a wonderful card from a professor that said, 'I don't know what your plans are after school or if acting is a part of it, but you have something special.' Hearing that from someone who I had so much respect for pointed me in that direction.

I was the laziest person around. Suddenly, one day, I decided to become an actor. Thank God for that whimsical decision: else, by now, I'd have been a 140-kilo, butter-chicken-bingeing hotelier.

I think if I could pick one moment it would be when I was going to college in the South and it wasn't what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to be out here in LA and acting.

When I came to Mumbai in 2005 for a holiday, I received work offers. So I decided to stay back and pursue a modelling and acting career.

Without so much as taking another step towards the field, I turned around, went back into the gym, and I told my coach, 'Jimi Hendrix just died, and I'm quitting the team to become a guitar player.'

Music is what I always dreamed of doing. But at a certain point in my career, they convinced me to act, and that started me acting.

As a kid, I wanted to be an actress, but ambition and reality are two different things.

I gotta follow my heart. It ain't football. If football made me complete, I would play. But whenever I think of it, my heart pulls me away from whatever reason... This means I'm done.