Alexis Wright Quotes

I wanted to be a doctor at one point and I also wanted to be a pilot. I think if you grow up in a dodgy area, reality often beats down those ambitions as you get older. But with me that never really happened.

I always wanted to be a winner, to score goals. There was no massive bravery in terms of my mum passing away and stepping up. I just wanted to score. I know everyone would have given me a pass on it if I hadn't taken it. But I'd have had the hump with myself if I'd shirked it.

I'm a poor kid from the streets. What I've been able to achieve has really just been through hard work and not letting anyone tell me that I couldn't do something. I always try to encourage people to just pursue your dreams.

I try and tell all the kids that I meet that hope to be amazing one day and be a professional athlete or a doctor or a lawyer or whatever they want to be. I tell them they can do all that because Tourette's won't stop them.

I'm very ambitious, despite all the challenges I face in the streets.

I've had a very unusual background in science - not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.

I came from such a simple origin, without any great privilege, and I would say I also wanted to make a mark. It wasn't until I was about 15 that I appeared in a race.

You have to lift your head up out of the mud and just do it.

I have too much drive and determination to let anything falter me. Because I know that life's short and there's so much that I wanna do, and I can't do anything that might hold me back or get stuck in.

It was never easy, but I always tried my best and kept complaints out of my heart by holding tightly onto the hope that one day, I would read and write.

If I were to listen to people all the time when they say, 'Hey, this is a really high challenge, this is a high climb, the bar is pretty steep,' then I wouldn't have gone to the academy. I wouldn't have become an aircraft carrier pilot. I wouldn't have become a Navy SEAL for sure. And I probably wouldn't have applied to Harvard.

My mother wanted to be a teacher when she was young, and my father didn't approve of it, so she fought very hard to become one. And she did it. So when I said I wanted to become an actress, my mother was very supportive. She always said to me, 'There's no such thing as 'can't.'

I'm living proof you can excel regardless of where you come from.

I am fortunate: my parents told me the world was my oyster, when they could have said I wouldn't make it for a lot of reasons - rural, girl, small African country. So, no regrets.

I struggled to get through high school. I didn't get to go to college. But it made me realize you can do anything if you want to bad enough.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

If you were brought up in the '40s, a kid in Ossining, New York, hanging out at the poolroom and stealing, how can you think, 'Here I am in Ossining. I, too, can be a movie star!'

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

Despite growing up in very poor circumstances, my father had big dreams.

I'm a doer and I just want to do it. Whatever attitudes, prejudices, stereotypical ideas that are in front of me, I will break them. But the only way I can break them is by getting a job, and if I need to start in the gutter, I will start in the gutter and work my way up. Money isn't an issue.

I thought about the problems I had growing up: how I prioritised football over school, but people were telling me I wouldn't make it, that it wasn't possible. The thing is, I did make it, thanks to my own will and determination and the help of some people I had around me in my hometown.

I come from zero and I've had to push myself up to where I am today. I'm not going to give up and I'm going to keep pushing.

My mum had me when she was just 18 and she worked three jobs, including bar tending, to put food on the table and she also went to night college. She worked really hard for us and I kept myself busy with football.

There's a lot of kids just like me growing up in the Philippines, so I don't want them to give up. So listen to your parents, work hard and you can achieve so much.

My mom and dad both worked when I was little... My mom, her mom died when she was 11, so she had a rough childhood as well. She put herself through college in three years at the University of Texas - while working a job to pay for it.