Phyllis Smith Quotes

My mom and dad were actors when they were younger and had a horrible experience of it. My dad became a literary agent and my mom a casting director.

I know how difficult it is for actors to get work, because I did casting for all those years.

I never wanted to be an actor, and then 'GH' was the first time where my managers were like, 'Quit your day job. You got a thing.'

Actors can't retire. What would they do?

As a theater actor I always wondered, 'Is there a place for me in Hollywood?'

I'm in this new Showtime series called 'Ray Donovan.' I play this guy Stu Feldman who runs Paramount Pictures, so the total opposite to this character.

Growing up, the last thing I ever thought I'd do is be an entertainer.

I can't tell you how good it is to go from 'Homeland' to be lucky enough to find 'The Blacklist' at the right time. It literally came at the very end of pilot season when I thought there was nothing left.

I became disillusioned with dance when I was 16 and started focusing on acting.

It wasn't that I left acting; it's just that I put it aside while I set about becoming a comic.

Between 18 and 26 I acted professionally, on the stage and a little bit on television. Acting is okay, but it's quite pressurized. Then I went to England - I wanted to reinvent myself.

I actually got hurt in a steel factory in 1985 and so that changed my life. I went to a junior college and that's where I discovered acting.

I just went to Harvard a little while, because I graduated from Armstrong High School in Washington and then I went up there but I didn't stay that long because I went into show business.

I will never do another TV series. It couldn't top I Love Lucy, and I'd be foolish to try. In this business, you have to know when to get off.

I started as a director and just fell upon acting.

Suddenly I was writing a lot of screenplays, and I was no long in New York, so I stopped acting in plays, and it just became too tricky to find a part to play, either in a play or a film that coincided with my schedule writing and or directing.

For years in football I was angry with the game, angry with pundits and, a lot of the time, angry with the journalists writing about me. All that changed when I got my break in movies.

I was a crazy guy in Hollywood back in the day, and then when I switched into theater, I got into work mode.

I loved living and breathing theatre so much that I decided I had to find a way to bring my desire to act and my ability to support myself together. I'd run through the possibilities in Washington, so that meant moving to New York.

I had done some commercial work in junior high and stuff - my mother would bring me into the city, and we'd go on these crazy castings. Acting was something I always dreamed of doing... it was my passion when I was young.

The acting was first. As a teenager I was an actress; and then I came back as a singer.

Before 'Entourage,' I couldn't get a sitcom.

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?'

I did nothing but theater until, I guess, '99. I was all the way through college the first time that I had stepped in front of a camera. And it's weird; it's definitely a transition.

I don't see myself being an actress forever.