Samuel L. Jackson Quotes

People ask, 'What's the best role you've ever played?' The next one.

I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.

What kind of role do you play after someone like Stringer, you know what I mean? You play another gangster. What’s the point of that? I’ve played the gangster. I try to keep it really varied; it just makes for more of a fun and interesting career.

One of the by-products of being allowed to start my professional career prematurely is that the evolution of my work is really evident.

Careers go in cycles. I've plateau-ed. I've been at the bottom of the ocean... You win some, you lose some.

I want to be a working actor; I want to do jobs that excite me and challenge me, and I want to something fun.

With my career in general, I feel like I'm finally getting to do the roles that I've always wanted to do. It's a slow build; you can't ever get the roles that you want in the beginning of your career because you don't have the buzz or the heat, or whatever the hell it is you need for the agents and the studios to be happy.

We live in Los Angeles, where you are expected to move every two to four years, so people can see how well your career is going.

I'm proud of what I have accomplished so far in my career, but the finish line is nowhere in sight. Still, it's fun to look back before we move forward.

I loved working with my brother [Beau] and my father [Lloyd] whenever that happened. I had a wonderful experience making "The Fabulous Baker Boys," which I felt was a great movie, too.

Sometimes, with the scale of a film, it's like when I walked on the sets of "The Matrix," especially in "Reloaded," there was the city square, or in "Revolutions" with some of the machine world, you're like, "Wow, this is a big playground," which is fun to watch. But the acting experience and the collaborating and creating the world, working on the piece, they're the same joys.

I've always prided myself in not reveling in past accomplishments and focusing on future achievement, instead. That's been my career motto.

I think a lot of people try to plan things in their career. They feel like, If I don't get this done by the time I'm thirty, everything's over. But I've worked with a lot of people whose careers shot to the top later in life.

Develop a mentor at each stage of your career - someone who will give you guidance and advice.

My career started slowly and then tapered off.

It's more fun to play a good character with a good director and good actors around you. That's what makes it fun, and the more variety, the better.

Working is the best way to understand and grow, as an actor, in my opinion. That's been my experience.

I've never had to deal with ageism - so far - in my career; I have been able to navigate my career and getting older and the roles and opportunities that have come to me.

Every job after the first job I got was icing on the cake. This is so much fun.

You need those people to also have power and authority, and in a way that has been the story of my career.

In my early career, I look at that time as a series of trial and error and learning as I go.

You've got to pick your roles really carefully. It's a lot more fun to play a layered woman, than just someone where what you see is what you get, by far.

I think I've been fortunate enough to have a fairly long career and hopefully I'm at the middle of it now. And I think I'm starting to develop a certain amount of experience and a certain amount of wisdom about kind of what really matters and what doesn't matter.

If you're lucky enough to get to play a character for a long time, it's life-changing.

My career has kind of taken on a life of its own.