Gary Barlow Quotes

When our daughter was born, a light went on for me - there was more to life than what I was doing. It felt like being famous for being a paint salesman. It wasn't the dream I was sold on. I'd had enough of it.

After 2000 or so, I started to realize I wanted to be doing something else. I didn't want to be in front of a camera. I was frustrated. I didn't think I would stop acting, but I didn't want to be seen.

When I was younger, my whole sense of self-worth was based on whether or not I was working, which was awful. And I had a baby at 20 years old, so it wasn't just about me. At around the age of 30 there was a stretch where I wasn't working - certainly not on anything I liked, anyway - and I started to do other things.

Maybe since I was 35 years old it was time to go upstairs.

When you're in a public profession like I was, and you stop doing it like I did, people think you're either crazy or dead.

I think midlife crisis is just a point where people's careers have reached some plateau and they have to reflect on their personal relationships.

My story of success and failure is not just about music and being famous. It's about living and loving and trying to find purpose in this crazy world.

I just turned 40, and I look at so many performers and so many people who are actually always on time and always have an album out. They don't have actual lives, in my opinion. I feel like I'm so much more than being famous and meeting a musical quota. And I don't know, just the weight of the scrutiny and attention is too weird for me.

It is kind of hard to figure out who you are when you've lost your job at age 13, when that was basically how you identified yourself.

Yeah I grew up in the public eye. I became a man in the public eye, which is kind of a bizarre thing to come to terms with. Now I'm in my late 20s and I was in my early 20s when I became recognizable. But I think 'Moneyball' represents a very strong shift in my career and becoming an adult and a man.

When I first retired from the game, I had times in my life when the days just wouldn't move.

I'm still learning more about myself and my situation and really, off the court, how to function there, because I'm kind of getting the taste of retirement now.

I shouldn't still be working out how to be misanthropic singleton comic when I'm 60. I should have moved on by then.

At 33 years old, I didn't have to work anymore. I had to search through 'What am I going to do for the rest of my life?' I wasn't ready to fly-fish for the rest of my life.

My career was about to change radically, in turning 50 I had hit the age where my Dad made a big career and his life started to unravel.

What else do I have to offer? Nothing happens to me anymore. That’s the reality of getting old, and I guess that’s really the crux of the matter. I’m not ready to be old yet.

When a man is forced into early retirement, he is often being 'given up for a younger man.' Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being 'given up for a younger woman' is for a woman... Why do many men get more upset by retirement than women do from the empty nest when their children leave home? When females retire from children, they can try a career; when a man retires from a career, his children are gone.

I spent my late twenties and all of my thirties figuring out what I was supposed to be doing and where my home was.

I didn't know what I wanted to do until I was 40. Seriously.

There's a lot of times when I just want to scream into the void.

People don't understand, and I do, is what happens after wrestling. What do you do when people stop chanting your name? For me, I already had that with the nightclub business before wrestling and now with DDP YOGA.

I got some funky scholarships to play soccer and did well in my SATs, so I went off to college and then grad school but found that that wasn't me. My family, relieved I seemed to have come to my senses, were happy to let me go to film school.

I didn't want to go to college, I didn't want to play football anymore, and I kind of just goofed off for about a year and a half.

To me, I can be famous in sports. But to me, I cannot say it means a lot to be famous. Being famous is something I don't like.

I'm glad that I walked into my purpose. I'm glad that I walked into something that was a smooth transition from football.