Terry O'Quinn Quotes

When I left 'Days of Our Lives,' I was like, 'I don't know if I'm ever working again. I'm going to do the best I can. If it happens, great. If not, well... it sucks for me.'

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.

All actors think every job will be their last.

I just feel incredibly lucky to be employed when there are so many actors and actresses who are not employed. That's why, you know, I sometimes feel desperate, in case I'm not going to be cast again.

I do love my work. As an actor, you live from job to job, though, and you have to be prepared for that.

I've never been in jeopardy, but being an actor is a pretty shady place to be because you never know where your next job is.

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

I think a lot of actors, sometimes what happens I think is that actors finish a movie and they go, 'Oh my god, I'm never going to work again,' even big huge actors, and so they'll take something thinking that something else will never come along.

The toughest workout can never match the pain of being out of work.

There's only two givens with choosing acting as a profession: one is you will always be unemployed, always, and it doesn't matter how much money you make, you're still always going to be unemployed; and that you have no power.

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

You can get fired from any job at any time.

I still have the actor's disease. I always think I'll never get another job.

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 word 'career' and 'actor' really don't fit in the same paragraph, let alone sentence. There is no career structure for actors.

You spend five months filming in outer space and saving the world, and suddenly that kind of family unit and story disappears, and you come crashing back down to Earth, and you have to do your own washing... and most actors are insecure that the last job they did will be their last job ever.

Post-'Daily Show' has been so busy, which I've been surprised about. We're basically independent contractors in a way. So you have one gig, and you're worried about never getting another gig again, or at least I do.

I think about work all the time. I was in my bathroom yesterday and thought, 'I could never work again.' I don't have a job lined up right now - what if I never get another one?

I think a reason why actors get reputations for being crazy and neurotic is because your life task is constantly in flux.

After college, I became a geologist, mapping what lay beneath the earth's surface. I thought I had my life pretty figured out and all my boxes checked. But then, I was laid off - along with thousands of other geologists. I lost not only my job, but also my profession.

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 won't say I'll never go back to a soap because an actor's life is so precarious. You can have the most wonderful patch where everyone wants to work with you, and in the blink of an eye the phone won't ring for a month, even a year.

I went to LaGuardia, so I'm very close to the reality that lot of actors work rarely.