Professional Disillusionment Quotes

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

After my years in Hollywood, I got tired of apologizing for work that really wasn't mine to begin with.

If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.

My father wanted me to be a pharmacist like himself. He had been a doctor, but he no longer believed in medicine; so he became a pharmacist, but he believed in that hardly more.

I am a little older and understand the nature of the business - the older you get the more your skills supposedly diminish, but I think I am getting wiser in how to use my physical skills. That's the frustrating part when you put so much heart and desire into things and feel like you are not wanted.

I know a lot of law officers, and every single one of them faces a moment - usually after about three hours on the job - when they realise that there's no connection between law and justice.

I can't understand marketing. I think it's because I never looked at what I do as a job. I've rebelled against that and I will continue to.

I'd rather kill myself than work in the music industry today.

Actually, my career as a music director turned out to be a disappointment. I believed I gave good songs but the response and recognition from the industry was not great.

When the joy of the job's gone, when it's no fun trying anymore, quit before you're fired.

I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.

Privately, I'm thrilled with what I do, but publicly, I hold it in disdain.

I left the 'Trib' in 1970 with the feeling that I would never have a career in establishment media of any kind.

I liked teaching, but the bureaucracy of academia and the petty intrigue... It wasn't a good fit. Once I admitted that myself, that I didn't like academia, I was ready to try TV.

There's a danger of some of the best people saying, 'I don't want a career in science.'

There is a mystique about psychiatry that people think that you have some kind of a magical lens, you know, Superman's X-ray vision into the soul. One of the reasons I left psychiatry is that I didn't believe that.

Some of the best times I've ever had in my life have been because of acting and through acting. But I'm not interested in the game of acting and being an actor and auditioning and all that stuff.

Every man in a bank hates what the bank does and yet the bank does it.

The only film I ever made for money was something called 'Music From Another Room', which I really didn't like.

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.

I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income,for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business.

Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world--the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?

I got through college realizing business was repugnant.

I've several times had jobs that I thought were going to be my big break, and it didn't pan out.

I've been at stand-up 26 years now: After a while, you get as jaded as the proverbial gynecologist who no longer enjoys drugging and violating his patients.