Barry McGuire Quotes

I've had way more rejections than I've had jobs.

I was auditioning a lot in L.A., and I was actually getting called back a lot for sitcoms. But I wasn't getting jobs. I even tested for 'Saturday Night Live' and didn't get that.

I haven't gotten hundreds of jobs that I've auditioned for.

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.

Six months of looking for a job had made me an expert at picking out the people who, like me, were hurrying up to wait - in somebody's outer anything for a chance to make it through their inner doors to prove that you could type two words a minute, or not drool on your blouse while answering difficult questions about your middle initial and date of birth.

Being fired from a show - being fired in any way, in any instance, any business - is just hard.

In L.A., you constantly go on auditions, and you're usually not what they're looking for - you get used to going back and back to the same show, and nothing happens.

I'd knocked on doors when I'd gone to theater school in Los Angeles the summer of my junior year, trying to find an agent and submitting headshots, but nobody would see me, and I knew it was virtually impossible to get an audition if you didn't have an agent.

When I left art school and went in search of work, visiting publishers and showing them my drawings and illustrations, I was met with a polite and sometimes enthusiastic response but no commissions.

I never took to Hollywood.

I stopped courting Hollywood a long time ago.

A lot of times, you just don't get the jobs you want to get.

I couldn't get an acting job to save my life when I moved to L.A.

My phone was not ringing very much at the time after USC, and that was a very humbling experience after being let go there and to go through that process. You start calling a lot of people that don't call you back all of a sudden, and you realize things about people.

I can't get a job, I can't get arrested.

I had a lot of fans in New York. The press would write about me, but I couldn't get a paying job.

I've always been interested in being in other people's movies. I never get any offers.

Being an actor is mostly about rejection and being out of work. It was a fast lesson in all of that stuff.

I just became a singer, because I could never get work as an actress.

There's a stage where you're desperate to get a job, and you're waving your hands in a sea of nothingness, going, 'Please, please, please! I'm over here - give me a job!'

For every successful actor or actress, there are countless numbers who don't make it. The name of the game is rejection. You go to an audition and you're told you're too tall or you're too Irish or your nose is not quite right. You're rejected for your education, you're rejected for this or that and it's really tough.

Acting is a life of rejection.

I don't get cast for every job and I understand that.

I didn't have a job because nobody would hire me. My friends were getting hired, and I couldn't even get a job interview. That really rocked my self-esteem because I didn't understand what I did wrong on those job applications.

My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.