I'd been a psychiatric social worker for 17 years, but within 24 hours after I started the case against studying reading Bible in school by my son, I was fired from my job as a supervisor in the city public welfare department. And I was unable to find another one. So my income was completely cut off.
It's like any other job: there's a method to it and it's really important to get that down. I'm still working on it, I got a lot to learn. It's one thing to make records but it's a whole 'nother capacity to be a star - whatever that is.
I was imagining a long life of being a stone cold loser. Then I got a job, which was really nice, then I got a great agent, a great manager, which was really nice. I was doing a lot of set ups, and, you know, I got to start working in L.A.
It's not a very secure industry. I've spoken to a couple of people recently who had a successful TV show and then found themselves absolutely skint and struggling to find a job.
You never get every job you want.
I'm getting paid to tour and travel and I don't have to work a shitty job. And it's weird because you like start getting pissed off about that.
[Making music] only turned into this weird job in the last year or so. Once I figured that out, I was having a blast.
If employees feel you don't trust them to do their jobs correctly and well, they'll be reluctant to do much without your approval. On the other hand, when they feel trusted, that you believe they'll do the right things well, they'll naturally want to do things well and be deserving of your trust.
I mean, full stops are quite important, aren't they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burn-out from all the thankless effort.
After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.
I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.
I got a job as a children's librarian at PS 175 in Harlem, and that changed everything. That was an epiphany. I didn't know Harlem existed. I didn't know there was such a place, because I grew up in white Queens, where five miles is 100 miles.
The first time I ever intersected with the quote unquote industry or Hollywood or being given a paid job as a director all came because of the reputation I got coming out of Sundance as a veteran Sundance filmmaker.
I feel like part of your job as an actor is you're going to get noticed, and the more successful you get, the more noticed you are. It's kind of like a Catch-22.
It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don't think anybody has held this job who hasn't felt personally responsible for those being killed.
We decided that our first job was to help the schools serving the children from the very lowest income groups. Those families constitute the number one burden, the number one burden in this Nation on the school systems.
In most fields of endeavor there are no easy jobs; there are only graceful ways of performing difficult ones.
One of our jobs is to keep women working, which we do by keeping women coming to the movies. And doing that means making good, smart, often funny movies that women can identify with-with terrific dialogue we all remember and cherish, and stories that illuminate our lives and decisions and turning points.
The Patriot Post not only does the best job of putting important news, policy and opinion in proper context, but also of cutting down to size the pompous praters and propagandists on the left.
When someone tells me what he or she was doing the first time they heard a song of mine, then I've done a good job. If my song becomes about your life, then I'm successful.
Fortunately, I've never had a job
I joke that I've never been burdened by having an actual hit. There's something to that. My records have sold enough to make the record company money to help me keep my job. But I've never had anything so firmly ingrained in the mind of the public that I'm expected to repeat it.
I would recommend, definitely, developing a 'day job' that you like - don't expect to make money writing!
That's the interesting thing about writing. You can start late, you can be ignorant of things, and yet, if you work hard and pay attention you can do a good job of it.
If you feel comfortable, and you feel happy, and successful at your job, then that's success. You define that as success, then that's success. Success is not a general thing. It's a personal thing. It's a personal attribute.
