career unpredictability Quotes

When you are an historian, there's probably nothing that matters more than to be recognized by your colleagues in your own profession. I was lucky enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for History. I had to give a talk right after that to some young people. The most important thing to tell them, I think, is that you can't ever know that it's going to turn out that way.

When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.

I don't know where the hell I'll be in 5 years. Maybe I'll be producing movies maybe I'll be on a corner selling apples. I don't know, but I'm having a hell of a lot of fun.

No one is guaranteed a job in this.

Every job in Hollywood is a risk. You don't know, when you sign a contract, if something is going to pop, you don't know whether this or that network is going to support your show. You just show up and do the best work you can do, gravitate towards the best material, you know, and try to make the right choices. And the rest of it is a roll of the dice.

My career has been very strange. My career is like a heart monitor. I get involved in a good project now and then to keep things going. And then I make things that I work on that I hope are going to be good so I can make a living and keep a roof over the heads of those little monsters I have in my house.

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.

Films are really cool because, every couple months, or however many times you can get a job because there's a lot of luck involved in that, you're playing a different character.

Part of being an actor is never knowing where your next part is coming from.

I find in my career that I never know what's going to happen in two months.

That's one of the things of being an actor. You have to push any knowledge of any future, at all, out of your mind. You never know what's going to happen where.

I think, with soccer, you never really know what's going to happen in your career - that's the beauty of it.

Acting is one of the most risky businesses you could ever be in. You literally do not know where your next paycheck will come from.

For the last thirty years in my career I never know what I'm doing next.

A doctor can be a doctor today and they will be a doctor tomorrow. But an actor, well you're not working at anything right now, whereas the doctor is going to have their job tomorrow, for the most part. So there's the insecurity of that, and you have to go where the work is.

I turned down plenty of films which proved to be hugely successful. And, of course, I've also had plenty of experiences where everyone thought we were doing brilliant work and it ended up pretty horrific. Same as any actor, really.

I like it that my career has all the predictability and continuity of a children's nonsense rhyme.

You never know when you're taking a job, ever... but you try to take good scripts. That's all you can do as an actor - take the best thing available. Even then, it's not [really] in your control. Certainly not in film and TV, because there are so many other elements. You just have to take control of your own performance.

The great thing as an actor is that I don't know what my agent is going to call me with next.

I'd like to think that I have a plan, but you can't really pick what scripts you're going to get or what movie is going to come along.

I do think that acting is such an unpredictable job, and you're away a lot. If you're dating somebody outside the industry, it can be hard to understand that.