Remember that your reputation is everything. You build your personal brand through everything you do, whether big actions or small decisions, and that brand will stay with you throughout your career.
Right now in my career, it's like I'm having more fun than I've ever had, so it's kind of like, 'Man, I can't stop now.'
I really want to make this the last stop of my career. I don't want to be a vagabond, so to speak, and be traveling from team to team, year in and year out. I'm not that type of guy. I like to be settled.
I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right.
Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise: those guys have well-planned careers. I'm just on a journey. Wherever I run across a job, I say, 'Okay, I'll do that.'
When I was 10 or 11 people started saying there was something special about my voice. But when I was 15 or 16 is when I really thought my hobby could become my career.
My greatest reward is knowing for certain, as I do with many other acts and artistes, that without Jonathan King being alive and involved, Genesis would not exist, and the guys would have had careers as intended - as accountants and lawyers!
I knew that you couldn't make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.
Any adaptation - and I've done three in my career. I did 'Sweeney Todd' and 'Hugo' and 'Coriolanus.' It's important to find what makes it a movie as opposed to just a film presentation of a stage play.
What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
I think I'm always conscious of not letting things fit into a specific box. Being a filmmaker and trying to chart a career, you never want anyone to be able to pigeonhole you into one specific thing.
Most men are far younger when they have their children and they're building their careers. If they are older they probably don't have the luxury of retiring - and generally sixty something-year-old men don't choose to have a child and spend all their...
When political correctness first started coming around, it ruined Andrew Dice Clay and Eddie Murphy's stand-up career. Sam Kinison died at just the right time, 'cause no one was going to tolerate what he was saying anymore either.
I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.
I think it is probably more important to attend specialized conventions for a journeyman writer than any other, but it's useful at all stages of a career, if for nothing else, to find out how the industry is working at any given time.
When I look back at this career I've had, I don't know where it goes from here, but certainly any time I can make a movie that's different, that explores something that's not a retread of something else, I'm interested in it.
Early on in my career, I'd go into the makeup trailer, and they'd spend an hour doing my makeup, and I would hate it. I'd go into the bathroom, wash it off and start over again, which took an enormous amount of time. So I just started doing it myself...
I was a guy back in the Eighties who was one movie away from a huge career, which at that time didn't happen. In the Nineties, I worked a lot, but it was kind of, 'Get out there and dig and find things.' Then I guess 'The Rookie' and 'Far From Heaven...
I look at the careers of people I'm standing on the shoulders of. People like Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sarah Vaughan. These are icons I wanted to emulate, and I feel like they've been holding me up for quite a long time.
One thing I have learned in my painful career as a gambler is that bragging when you get lucky and win a few games will plunge you into gloom and unacceptable beatings very soon. It happens every time.
