A Quote by Billy Joel

When I first started I didn't know a lot about the job, so I kinda had to figure it out by wire, ya know? It was hit and miss, I made mistakes, and fortunately I was able to recover from most of 'em. But I promised myself if I ever get to a point where I can help somebody that's trying to learn how to do this, that I would try to do that.
I'm sure you feel differently about writing than you did when you first started. When you get older and your brain changes, you have to figure out how your job fits into your life as it changes, you know what I mean? I guess everybody goes through that stuff, and I'm no exception, always trying to figure out what I'm doing with music.
You learn so much from making mistakes, not even necessarily mistakes that I've made, a lot of the time the films just don't work out because it's a really difficult process. And sometimes there's a certain person underlining process. But I've had an opportunity to work on all different types of films and I have had a lot of opportunities to stretch myself in different ways and now is the time where I get to try and figure out out the roles that I can really play well and play them well.
I believe that our society's "mistake-phobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning.
I kind of had to figure stuff out on my own and get myself snowboarding competitively again. I went through all types of different legs to try to learn which were going to work for me. Luckily, I was able to figure it out.
My first program taught me a lot about the errors that I was going to be making in the future, and also about how to find errors. That's sort of the story of my life, making errors and trying to recover from them. I try to get things correct. I probably obsess about not making too many mistakes.
I had promised myself when I first got started that if I got to the point my life where I started feeling 'Gee, I'd rather be at home than at work', and that started happening more often than not, that it would be time to leave. I'd wake up some days and go "Oh, I don't even know if I want to go face this anymore". I would, I would go do it, I'm a dutiful kind of person and not afraid of work.
Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.
I'm still passionate now about my job, but when I first started out as a kid, I was so motivated. No one had ever acted in my family before, and my parents had no idea how to help with that. I would leave notes on my parents pillow every night at 13 saying, "Please help me find an agent!" Eventually it worked, so I relate to that go-getter mentality.
He had a lot of talent, but didn't have much dedication, wasn't organized, didn't know how to learn, didn't know how to comprehend what he was doing, didn't try to learn how to get better.
Over the years since then though, I couldn't even begin to try and count all the mistakes I've made but also, all the joys I've found while traveling on the road. So in living this kind of lifestyle day in and day out for that many years you learn. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about how people should be treated and how they should treat each other. For the most part, I've really learned patience, temperament and fairness all around.
High school was the first time I ever saw spoken word poetry. The first place I ever performed a poem was at my school, so in some ways it was the nucleus of how it all started. For me I think high school was a period of trying to figure myself out, and poetry was one of the ways I did that, and was a very helpful avenue to try to do that.
I can remember when I first got to los Angeles . I didn't have a car, I didn't have any money. I was walking the streets, you know, trying to get from place to place on foot almost. Sometimes, you know, you say, how am I ever going to get from here to there? There are a lot of people still having that dream and not being able to get there. So you never know. The idea is to keep on tap dancing, though.
I make many mistakes. Many mistakes. I'm not a perfect human being. I have to learn from my mistakes. And a lot of the ones I've made have been public. So I always get nervous when people speak about something that sounds like a role model, because I don't know if I've been a great role model myself.
I just started trying to figure out how to write [something] which was unlike anything anybody had ever seen, and once I felt like I had figured that out I tried to figure out what kind of book I could write that would be unlike anything anybody had ever seen. When I started writing A Million Little Pieces I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.
When I see ya baby girl, I miss feelin on ya. I miss everything that's real about ya and that's everything about ya, that's just how I feel about ya
You get told a lot in school to tell what you know, write what you know. But what excites me about filmmaking, about being a storyteller, is being able to learn about other people, putting myself in somebody else's shoes, whether that be someone from the Dominican Republic or someone from Cuba or inner-city Brooklyn.
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