Career Pivot Quotes

After playing Saffy in 'Ab Fab', I needed to take time out from acting to see if I really wanted to do it. I had been doing it for a very long time and I was being sent the same sort of scripts again and again.

I was studying pre-med at UCLA when I decided show business was for me, and the best way to make it was in music. I had just one problem. I was tone deaf.

I was in college, and very disappointed. I majored in commercial art and interior design for three or four years. At that time, it seemed the thing I really wanted to do, production design, just wasn't available in the U.K., so I turned to music.

I think at some point I am going to throw in the belt and decide to stick behind the camera.

I worked as a receptionist in England for a couple of years whilst I was building up my business. I decided to take a massive pay cut from my full-time job and work as a receptionist so I could make my own business work.

Around 2008 when the writers' strike happened, all my stuff was getting stuck in development, and I thought, 'I'm going to try my hand at horror because I always loved it as a kid.'

When 'Totally Biased' was canceled, I thought my career was over - but apparently it wasn't.

I studied mass media and brand management and was looking to do an MBA. When an acting offer came by, I thought I'll do one film so that it would look good on my CV. Films happened one after another, in different industries. I'm so glad things turned out the way they did.

I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I was all set to take up a brewing job in Scotland when a chance encounter with an Irish entrepreneur led me to set up a biotech business in India instead.

I had just come off my third consecutive failed television series. I had sworn off doing TV for a while. I was going to go to New York, sublet an apartment, and find my soul again. Before I got on the plane, my agent sent me the script for 'Psych.' I read it on the plane and realised it had a lot of potential.

I could have easily never worked again after 'Precious.' I could be back at my receptionist job and no one would be surprised, but I'm having a very crazy little career that no one thought would happen. Although that was never the plan.

I started as a ventriloquist, a very bad ventriloquist. And people saw my lips moving and it was ridiculous, so finally I decided I'd better change my occupation.

I got my degree in acting and theater, and then I had a teacher who told me to take a class with The Groundlings. And for a second, I thought, 'Well, I don't know about that. I'm a serious actress.' And then I did, and I loved it, and I said, 'Ah, well, I guess this is what I'm going to do now.'

I took a break from acting for a little bit, came back, and didn't know how it was going to be, but I had so much fun. I really had, like, a reinvention, a renewal.

I was working on a book about health and wellness, and nobody was interested in that from me. Thankfully, my cowriters reached out and sold me on the idea of doing an autobiography.

I thought I was going to be a professor; then I ran screaming from there into magazine journalism.

Sure, I've thought about retiring, but in my mind, if you can't sing the song anymore, change the song and sing a different one!

I suppose that by being absent from the music business, it appeared that I just dropped out, but really I never did. I was continuously working and doing various things.

I think, because I didn't think of myself getting into writing and production since I was younger, I could get bored of it if I don't continue to pivot.

When my career slowed, I knew deep down it wasn't over.

The great break of my literary career was going to law school.

I did get offers from Hollywood, but they were all scripts with monsters in them. If I had done them, I would have disappeared. I would have come back to France anyway, and I would have had to start all over again and lost a lot of time.

My career definitely took an unexpected change in direction when it came to 'Here Lies Love.'

I actually thought I wanted to be Thomas Wolfe, but I didn't have the talent. So I thought I could edit Thomas Wolfe.

I was on cruise control from '85 to '95, and it was my fault. There were a lot of self-inflicted wounds, when I was not doing any original material. I wasn't directing. I wasn't writing. That's not who I am.