Career Obsession Quotes

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

I can't tell you how many times I quit only to realize that when the work has been your life, you don't really have a life without it.

If I'm enjoying something, I'd like to be able to just have it all. Frankly, that's the way I'm approaching my career now. I'm a total workaholic.

I'll be working until I die.

Do not keep company with people who speak of careers. Not only are such people uninteresting in themselves; they also have no interest in anything interesting. . . . Keep company with people who are interested in the world outside themselves. The one who never asks you what you are working on; who never inquires as to the success of your latest project; who never uses the word career as a noun -- he is your friend.

Then a year would go by and I'd realize I love the acting too much and it is my identity and I don't know how to be anything but an actress. It's who and what I am, so I always come back.

Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade but to intensity of self-seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation. Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.

In 1980, after 10 years at 'The Times,' I was at a crossroads in my personal life. I loved my family, but I was also so obsessive about my work that I found myself devoting more and more time to it. I wanted to be everywhere there was a good story, and that meant I had to choose between that and being with the family on important days.

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

I cannot imagine not working. I don't understand the word 'retirement.'

I watch films and TV almost like as a hobby - not even as a hobby: it's bordering on careerist. It would be easier to tell you what I'm not into than what I am.

I want to die at my desk.

Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics.

I never thought about settling down. I was obsessed with my career - I was blinkered. I finally met a woman who was worthy of me. Then we settled down and had many children.

I've become a body of films, not a man, I am all those films.

I think there are ways to get so caught up in your career and being so heavy and dramatic, and everyone wants to be a tortured genius.

I can't remember life before I was an actor. In fact, I was an actor before I knew what it was to be an actor.

It should be only a part of my life, but it isn't. I have only one thing: my work.

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.

If you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you're in big trouble.

People are so obsessed with making their careers and having a big house; then you realize that kills your dreams. It even kills what makes your life because you get so busy inside.

I was one of those people who put too much emphasis on work and career and material possessions, and it took its toll on all my relationships, on my physical health, my emotional and mental health.

If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, 'No.'

The least sexy city is Los Angeles. And it poses as the most sexy. As you grow up, L.A. is being sold to you as home of the bikini-clad party girls. And then you get there, and it's full of very goal-oriented, yoga-obsessed careerists.

I don't think I could ever stop being a game designer, that's just where my brain is going to be at until I'm in the coffin.