Alissa Quart Quotes

My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author.

My mum thought my TV and film addiction was laziness. If you're an immigrant, you know you'll never be an accepted part of society, but you hope your children will be, and you try to make them essential to the community in a practical way - being a doctor or a lawyer. Acting was beyond their comprehension.

I never hoped that both my children would become actors. I expected them to do something else.

I think my parents recognised that I'd always wanted to be a writer, and so they didn't think that this was some idle, faddish wish on my part.

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.

I decided in my late teens that I wanted to be an actor, and my dad and I agreed that films were better. I work alongside my dad, you see. I've thought that films were better since I was a kid.

I remember when I was 12, talking with my friends about what we wanted to do with our lives, astronauts, forensic detectives, all these different jobs. And the only thing I could think was an actor.

My dad is so impressed. He loves the movies and would take us two, three times a week, so this fantasy of mine of becoming an actor? I can blame my father for that. He's so amazed. And so happy.

Since I was 14, I wanted to make music, but I think I would also have made a good policeman. When I was eight, I wanted to be one so I could tell people off.

When I went home at 20 to tell my parents, 'I don't want to be an engineer, I want to try and write books,' I was braced for, 'That's not gonna happen.' But I didn't get that response, and maybe it was because of my dad's experience of having an artistic dream and having to put it aside.

My mother was really against it when I said I wanted to make films. She said that I should be a civil servant because that was safe, and it had security. But my mother was always very proud of my movies and would give videocassettes of them to all the neighbours.

If you grow up saying, 'I want to be a lawyer,' everyone says, 'Let's give her everything she needs to be a lawyer.' But if you say 'I want to be an artist or a dancer or a painter,' it's, 'Oh, she'll grow out of it.'

I thought a parent's job was to tell their children not to go into acting as a profession!

My parents were not pushy or anything like that. I think my mom was still expecting me to be an astronaut, but now she is very happy that I'm not doing that.

I wanted to be an actor, an astrologer, an astronaut; a lot of different things were going through my mind. But I also wanted to play guitar. I mentioned to my parents that I wanted an electric guitar for Christmas. They got me one! I sat there all Christmas morning making a lot of loud horrible noise.

During my early years, I thought I might be a musician. Like most kids, I didn't do what my parents wanted me to do. They were gung-ho that all their kids become actors. They loved showbiz so much. I am a product of nepotism, basically.

When I was a kid, I wanted to make movies. In particular, I loved animation and would love to have been an animator.

I definitely thought I was going to write books. I wrote a couple of children's books when I was like 11 when I was a child myself!

My mom is very practical, and she originally wanted me to have something to fall back on. She was a little fearful of my becoming an actor because she didn't see it as a way to make a living. My dad, who was born and raised in Cuba, was really cool with it.

It was my dad who encouraged me to come into films.

I think if more women had been directing when I was a child, I probably would have gone for directing first. But, as a child, all I wanted to do was make movies.

I have sisters who act, and I'd always seen it as their thing. I was never in the school plays like them - I wanted to be a painter.

My parents are from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I feel like it's an old Southern thing where people say that, as a kid, you can be an astronaut or a ballerina or a singer, but as a grown person, you need to go and get a job.

Of course, as a kid, I had no idea what was practical: I wanted to be a paleontologist, then an astronaut.

When I was growing up my parents never thought I would be an actor.