Professional Constraints Quotes

I realized that once I graduated from college, there might be a period of time where people might typecast me or be more limiting, and I might not be able to play a crazy character. For me, it was important to do that at least in school.

Obviously, for my line of work, I cannot eat barbecue that often. It takes a little bit to digest and it's not the healthiest thing to eat.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

Given a choice I would only want to work with Salman again and again, but that's not how the industry works.

Professionalism is friendly to the qualified performance of precise tasks, but unfriendly to those accommodations and bargains that give coherence and direction to general public objectives.

The wonderful thing about drama school is that it stretches you in a way the industry doesn't.

All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless.

My peers are all in sensitive jobs - at the C.I.A., the National Security Council, working for the Department of Defense. They can't stand up for me in public.

When I was on the radio, I used to be able to go a lot farther than I can now. You don't really remember until you're on the radio again, sometimes in your old radio station and sitting with the guys you used to work with and you go, 'Oh yeah, I can't say these things anymore. I'm handcuffed.'

In the first two years of my career, there were a lot of restraints on what I could do. I couldn't wear certain colors of lipstick, like bright pink, dark pink or red; [my lips] had to be natural. Eventually, I stopped communicating with certain people at the label, and did exactly what I wanted to do. And that was to cut my hair, dye it black, change my clothes, change my sound. Really to just express myself.

The great classics that, as a professional you don't get to do, you do as a student, when you don't know any better.

I write 200 columns a year, you know. That means I have to have 200 opinions a year. Sometimes, I don't give a damn one way or the other, but that's my job, so I got to take a side.

Unlike a typical professional, I can't quit my job to become a full-time author; I don't have that luxury. For me, writing is therapy; if I choose to write full-time, it might start feeling like work.

I was very frustrated, in a physical sense, by people seeing me in a way that I wasn't. And I was beginning to find myself boxed into a corner. Hopefully things have loosed up a bit, and I've gotten better and become more relaxed as an actor.

I would have happily done 'Bourne Legacy,' but a lot of decisions are made for you.

When my mother was young, only two professions were open to women ; teaching and nursing. She chose nursing, but the teaching profession was full of talented women like her, confined there in part because they had few career options.

It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand.

As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.

As a professional actor, I don't have much choice about what I've gotten into. I tend to be cast in comedies and I'm fine with that.

Overall, we had about 50 meetings where the brothers would say that I couldn't do any solo records, I couldn't write for other people, I couldn't do this and I couldn't do that. These guys were trying to nail my feet to the ground.

In many ways I wish I wasn't an actor dragging around the baggage from being one so that I could just devote my energies to encouraging people to find their true selves.

I didn't need tempting back to the theatre. It's always been something I'd wanted to do again and again and again, but with every job, you can only take what's in front of you or what's offered.

Maybe clothes are a form of creative expression for me. An outlet. Because I don't get to express myself creatively through my official duties.

When you're an actor, you're a slave to other people's visions.

I don't allow the industry or anybody to put me in a box. I did that for a minute and I was like, 'I can't do this anymore.'