Anthony Mackie Quotes

I came to acting quite late. I tried not to be an actor.

I stumbled into acting because a friend persuaded me to leave my 9 to 5 job and get into acting.

I looked for acting classes in Paris just to do something different than modeling. And then one day I just thought, 'Okay, that's enough, I have to start doing something.' I went to the acting agency and I just told them I wanted to act and asked them if they would give me a chance, and they did.

Shortly after I started working as a doctor, I decided to listen to the voice inside me before it was too late. It was now or never, so I decided to explore acting.

There was a time when I was practicing law in New York and I wanted to find something else to do. So I ended up leaving the practice of law to pursue my art and it just happened to be out of Lego bricks.

The truth of the matter is I stayed in L.A. raising my children, and when they went to college, I packed my bags along with them and came to New York and looked for parts in the theatre, because that's always what I preferred doing.

I was acting for years before the band, so I would like to get into that again.

I always thought I was going to be a dancer and then fashion kind of took over.

At about twelve I just knew, something clicked, and I knew I wanted to be an actor and my parents, to their credit, granted this 12 year old girl a chance to give it a try.

I was a litigation lawyer, following the crowd off the proverbial cliff, when I pressed the pause button.

I was at university and I was studying modern drama and studying English, and I just was like, 'I don't wanna be in this place. I wanna be acting.'

I came to New York to be an actor and I became a film producer first.

I've sort of become the poster boy for quitting your job and following your dreams.

I actually studied engineering in school - I have a degree in mechanical engineering. But, when I got out of school, instead of going to work as an engineer, I was in a band.

I never really considered acting as a career. I kind of fell into it. Originally, I wanted to be a painter.

I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn't figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.

When I went home at 20 to tell my parents, 'I don't want to be an engineer, I want to try and write books,' I was braced for, 'That's not gonna happen.' But I didn't get that response, and maybe it was because of my dad's experience of having an artistic dream and having to put it aside.

My parents are doctors, both my sisters are doctors, so I figured I'd just be a doctor too. Sometime in my junior year, I had this sudden realization that maybe that wasn't for me. I was sort of lost at sea.

My becoming an actor was a massive shift for me, and a terrifying one.

It wasn't easy at all for a qualified engineer to take the decision of giving it up, leave Punjab and try to make a name in films. But I really wanted to be an actor, hence I took the decision.

Once I got the job on 'Walking Dead,' I started thinking about how I always wanted to get back to the East Coast. My mom lives in Baltimore, and I have a lot of family in Baltimore and New York.

I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I've said in many essays, the thing that he hated more than anything else in life was spending money. And as soon as you leave your home, you're spending money.

Acting is something I always wanted to try after wrestling, and I felt like this was a perfect fit.

I gravitated to New York City in the late '70s to pursue a career in visual art, which is what I trained in at university.

I got to a point where I thought, now I have a choice. I can stay in theatre, or I can challenge myself and give this a go. And I want to challenge myself. I like to scare myself.