Claudia Black Quotes

I'm sure it's not great fun for them, or for any parent, when their child says they want to be an actor, 'cos it's quite an uncertain business and it can be terribly hard for most actors.

There's a really sweet spot with acting where you've finished a job, and you've got another one coming up in three or four months' time. That's my favourite period of unemployment.

I'm essentially a jobbing actor. If I'm out of work, I'll be the back end of a donkey.

I don't often get recognized for my work, but I look familiar. I'm just a working-man actor. I go and audition, and you just hope the work keeps coming.

Everybody that's an actor leaves it for a while 'cause they ain't got a job.

It's a weird thing when you spend your life trying to find these great scripts and great parts. You are reading scripts, you are traveling the world, you are hassling your agent. You are trying to find that script.

Sure, I'd love to be on primetime, but if I'm blessed enough to be picked up by another soap, thank God! It's so hard out there. And when you're not working, you feel horrible. You don't know when you'll get the next job. You don't know how long the soap genre will be around. I want to help keep these shows on the air and keep everybody working!

The great thing as an actor is that I don't know what my agent is going to call me with next.

The normal state of an actor is unemployed.

As an actor, your life is constant ups and downs. My friends and I joke that when a job ends and nothing is lined up, you have nothing to do for the rest of your life. You just ride that wave.

Most actors are lucky to ever get a job, period. I never forget that, because I have so many actor friends in L.A., and most of us barely ever work. And those of us that do, it's still only 60 days out of the year that we're actually on camera. It's an absurdly low number.

The only thing hard about being an actor is being out of work. So, when you get a job - that part ain't hard at all.

I slowly came to realize that this job of being an actor, you spend most of your time looking for work. That is your job. Your job is auditioning. You spend very little of your time actually working.

Juilliard was four years, and I called it 'med school with guaranteed unemployment at the end.' And it ends: you're getting ready to go out and be an actor, and... nothing.

I look at all these wonderful actors who are out of work, and I don't know what accounts for my good fortune, but I'm grateful for it.

I don't know if I will be acting all my life, honestly.

It's funny to think that when you get done with an acting job, you're considered unemployed. There are definitely times when those checks don't last forever. I went to college at a private school, and I racked up quite a bit of debt. I was very slow to pay them back.

I never wanted to be one of those desperate actors, just waiting for their next gig, who might have to take something that they didn't want to do to pay the rent.

I had no idea how one became an actor. I didn't know things such as drama schools existed. It all just sort of happened accidentally.

I will never be a career actor, I don't think. I don't feel that I have the skill set to jump into it that way, although I wouldn't mind giving it a try.

I've been incredibly lucky. I know what it's like to be an unemployed actor, to beat the bricks. I've been in the right place at the right time.

In this business, you're dependent on the writer, the filmmaker, the luck of beating out who knows how many people for the part. I'm over getting torn up about that.

I don't love being an actor, but I'm not qualified to be anything else. I was an auto mechanic and drove a tow truck and tried to go to school to be a paramedic.

I've always thought one of the tricks of being an actor for a long time is keeping yourself interested once you've figured out how to pay the rent.

I've always said that actor years is like dog years: it feels like forever when you're not working.