Nathan Sawaya Quotes

My mother's sobriety - that's when I found the theater, that's when I moved from being a basketball player to being a musician, to being an actor, to then being a writer.

I was used to having a job - ballet was my job, and I felt like I needed something artistic to focus on after I quit.

What do young, budding artists do, but go to law school? I had creative periods now and again, but it wasn't until I was practicing law that I really needed a creative outlet. I'd come home from long days at the office and draw, paint, and sculpt from clay, wire - even candy.

Instead of becoming an engineer like my brother, I moved to New York to be an actor.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

I became a cartoonist because I'd sort of failed at everything else, really. I mean, it was by default.

Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.

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

In 1994, after four years of talking about travel on my first show, I realized I knew so little about the world - I knew so little about myself. I decided to quit my job and pursue a postgraduate degree in New York.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

I never really considered acting as a career. I kind of fell into it. Originally, I wanted to be a painter.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

During the Eighties, when I was hurting for money, I thought, 'Hang on a minute - I can paint.' I was living in New York and I thought it would get the grocery money coming in, and it escalated from there.

It would've been hard to do something else, to as it were, run away from the circus and become an accountant.

I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn't figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.

I left my career in Hollywood, moved back to New York, and went to Lee Strasberg and studied with him for the rest of his life.

I was always excited by the idea of having my own company, but models are rarely serious when they venture off into something else, be it acting, singing, or starting their own business.

I chose when I was 30 to change my life entirely and become a director and sit in the dark and that's what I love doing.

I quit comics in 1988 and trained as a bus driver. I used to drive those big Greyhound coaches out of New York Port Authority and down to Princeton, New Jersey. It was, hands down, the best job I ever had, and I profoundly regret having left it. I kept that job the entire time I was on staff at DC Comics in the '90s.

I was a commercial artist when I left school, but luckily I became an actor. I've painted for many, many years. Now the last few years it's gotten more serious.

I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.

My dream many years ago would've been to continue to write and record songs in record/album form for years to come, but now records aren't what they were then - and so it doesn't actually feel very good to make a record of songs.

Music is my personal addiction. So much of everything I've done has only been to open more doors for the music itself. It all gets back to the fact that I am, first of all, a songwriter and a singer.

I'd been an actor my whole life, since I was a kid. And then, I quit for awhile and went to university. When I wanted to start acting again, I couldn't get a job, and that was really depressing. So, I realized, at that time, that I have to take responsibility for my own creativity.

It was around the age of 18 when I started to feel like I had learned everything I could learn from being a model - modeling is a really incredible form of expression, but I got into modeling because I loved fashion so much and I really loved photography.