I dropped out of high school and I couldn’t go to college ‚cause I wasn’t smart enough, so I’d resigned myself to loading trucks and playing punk rock on the weekends.

I love everything about my job, except being away from the kids.

I grew up thinking that a research scientist was a natural thing to be.

In any profession it gets to be a grind.

Work is making a living out of being bored.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

I was 18 years old, and it was a dream come true for me to work out and eat great food for free. What else do you want in life? People think that is what it is like to be in a SEAL team, but it is less than a fraction of your career as a real SEAL.

Doing music to pay bills is an uncomfortable situation. I never wanted to be in that situation.

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

I’m a workin‘ girl.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

I was offered a job on Wall Street by my uncle. But I wanted to get out. Make-it-on-my-own kinda thing.

I was always interested – I mean, it’s kind of part of your job – I was always interested in the camera.

My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‚Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?‘ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

Never get married in college; it’s hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you’ve already made one mistake.

I did go to Wellesley, a women’s college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

In college, a loss is pretty devastating. That feeling kind of goes away in an 82-game season. You hate to lose, but you also have a lot more games to make up for it.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

I knew when my career was over. In 1965 my baseball card came out with no picture.

In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

To me, the most important artists in my career are Arcangel and Balvin. Arcangel gave me the push, the respect in the streets.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

There has to be something in every role that interests you.

People have asked me, ‚What would you have done if you hadn’t gone into the Army?‘ I’d say I’d probably be a bus driver. I don’t know.

I’ve found that men I’ve dated who are in the same business can be really competitive. I’ve found a great group of girlfriends in the same business who aren’t competitive, but a few times guys have started comparing careers and it has been… challenging.

I like to work.

People think because I’ve got some success, I’ve made it, but in my eyes it’s like, ‚How long has Jay Z been in the business? How many albums has he got?‘ Not that I’m trying to be Jay Z, but I am trying to be around for a long time.

A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.

I was the first person to have a punk rock hairstyle.

It doesn’t matter if you want to be a teacher, an astronaut, or a reggaeton singer, you need to study.

Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

I have a lot of friends who do what I do. Either they’re actresses or singers or things like that.

I’m a working-class person, working with class.

Because my career is so important, I think I make a lot of – I wouldn’t call them sacrifices, but just concessions for my job. I love what I do, and I want to do it for a long time.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I’d ever have any interest in filmmaking.

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it’s not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, ‚Hey, I can’t really figure those things out.‘

That’s when it becomes a business. When you’ve been public a long time, when it’s a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.

You know, there are artists who are 35 and up that still make rap and that still works for them. I don’t know if I want to be that guy.

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

‚Via Dolorosa‘ is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and I’ll never act again.

There’s something boring about people who have to go to an office for a living.

You never get over losses. I’ve never gotten over one loss I’ve had in my career. They always stick with me.

You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

I could do nothing but Brooklyn shows for the rest of my career, and I could die ignorant.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it’s been something I’ve been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it’s something I hope to continue because it’s interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may not exist?

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.

It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

I happened to come along in the music business when there was no trend.

After my first year of college, each course I took in every field was so boring that I didn’t even go to the classes.