Riki Lindhome Quotes

I've been very lucky. I wanted to be an actress, but I didn't really have the drive to sell myself. Fortunately I had a terrific agent in New York who kept me going from job to job.

My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.

It's not like you do 'SNL' and then get handed movie roles. You work, you audition for stuff and try to get it. I think, a lot of people, it's the goal to be in movies or just to be working in general. But yeah, some of us get lucky and get some movie roles, and it's nice.

When I realized that you can't necessarily be cast in a really great part living in Austin, even when Hollywood comes to town, I got a demo reel together and headed out west.

I wanted to be an actor from a young age, but actually becoming one and seen the ugly side of the world does feel different and sometimes unwelcome. There are shallow, vapid, untalented people zombieing the streets of Hollywood, adding decadence and immorality to an already extravagant business.

The Professional Children's School, it's for professional kids, so if you wanted to ditch, you could just write, Audition on a note and leave. I didn't really like school all that much.

I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals.

Most people grow up dreaming of going to Hollywood and some of them work and work and work and finally end up in Hollywood.

If you're lucky, and not a lot of actors are these days, you get the chance to create a character.

Being an actor in L.A. is like being in prison: you go, you serve your time, you try to replicate Johnny Depp's career - and then you move to Paris.

I'm an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.

If my kids decide to be actors and really, truly love it and are passionate about it, then I would definitely want to help them along their way, but it's a tough business.

One of the tough things about being an actor, probably the hardest thing, is getting your foot in the door, and my father handled that for me at a very early age.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.

Trust me, it has been anything but easy to make it as an actor.

As an actor, I'm always just so pumped when I get any job. To be a working actor takes a lot of luck.

There is a lot of struggle in being an actor; you need so much emotional strength, no matter what level of stardom you have, that it's nice to have something steady.

Seems to me that this business, for actors anyway, is not so much about whether or not you do good work. It's about whether or not you get the chance to do good work.

I found an agent midway through my year-long run at 'Grease' and just started to audition. I fortunately booked 'South Pacific' six months after 'Grease' was over, and I feel like that was a huge turning point in legitimizing myself in the Broadway community, and getting to do that was absolutely amazing.

My mom got me into some commercials, and I basically, I guess, just got out of my shell I was in at the time because I can't remember. I've just been blessed ever since.

The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got 'The Devil Wears Prada,' and it's why I even got in the door for 'Mad Men.'

I'm lucky to just be a working actor. There are so many great actors out there and I'm just lucky to have gotten work.

Once I started working as a professional actor, it was like, 'Bye-bye waiting tables, bye-bye bartending, bye-bye all the cliched jobs actors do.' But after a year of not getting work, there's this really difficult conflict, like, 'Do I have to go back to being a waiter when people recognize me from a show?'

If you take every challenge everyone has in their life and multiply it in severity you get what it's like in the life of an actor.

I really always felt that I was going to be an actress. I had a lot of confidence in the fact that I would do well from a very early age. I didn't know how tough the business is.