Frances Tiafoe Quotes

I suppose 'Worried About the Boy' was a brave choice, but only in the sense that if I didn't get it right, my career would be over before it had begun.

There's always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If 'Pi' didn't work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don't think I would have gotten another shot at it. If 'Requiem for a Dream' didn't work out, they would have called me a 'one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump'.

I'm not telling anyone, 'Quit your job and be homeless to go for your dream.'

Careers can disappear just as quickly as they're made, so I'm in no hurry.

Greatness and fiasco is the same. You're reaching for something just out of your grasp, and if you get it, it's great, and if you don't, it's a disaster.

I don't think me walking away from modeling was scary for me. In hindsight, I think it was very risky, when you talk about risk. Because it paid the bills.

My life was on the line here and my career and everything I worked for, it was hanging by a thread.

Six months after we started, in 1964, there was a day when we sold only seven sandwiches. If we'd taken all the money from the register, we couldn't have paid an employee, much less the food or the rent or all that. It could have been a turning point. We could have given up.

I think people thought I was crazy for leaving Mexico when I had any project I wanted falling at my feet. But I risked everything to come to Los Angeles, where no one knew who I was, and start all over again. It was a very hard step to take. However, it was the moment I thought it was right to take a risk in my career.

I'm either going to have the career I want doing films, or I'll do something else - I'll be gone.

I'm afraid of what happens if this career doesn't pan out, because I have so much invested in it that I can't turn back now.

I could sit here and say, 'What would have happened if I hadn't made that crazy television show, if I hadn't made those crazy movies?' Well, I'd be back in Canada working at Dairy Queen.

'Gloria' was a gamble.

Really, my biggest risk was just the initial step to quit my day job to do music. I was packaging and shipping for an art gallery in Manhattan; I went to school for painting, so I always wanted to work around artwork, even though I wasn't really contributing anything to the scene.

Phoenix Nights' was really starting to take off. But I was scared to leave my job in case things didn't work out.

You don't know what pressure is until you play for five bucks with only two bucks in your pocket.

A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them.

To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.

I don't return fruit. Fruit's a gamble. I know that going in.

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.

If you over plan New Year's Eve it's going to be a disaster so you have to be alive to changes.

Life is a sleazy stranger, who looks vaguely familiar; flirting with a bimbo named disaster at the end of the bar.

The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything's about to go wrong in a way that's not controllable or knowable.

...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.