A Quote by David Niven

This is a terrible confession to make, but after I left the Army I had a number of things to try. I had a great conceit to think that if all else failed I could always go to Hollywood. So when all else did fail I really went to Hollywood. And then I found out how wrong I was.
I leave Hollywood, I go somewhere else and make some music, and then, when I have to go back to work, I try and take as much that I get from outside Hollywood back with me.
I stayed in the East for about a year after I graduated. Then, I came out to Los Angeles and started knocking on doors and working my way up. This was the '70s. I had been told how tough it was for a woman trying to make it in Hollywood, but I sort of had blinders on. I just did things anyway.
Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.
The doctor told Phil, my then husband, that my condition was really bad news. They had found an artery tearing and said I could die. They said they could try to patch it up but it could go horribly wrong. It all turned out okay in the end but it was touch and go.
The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn't fail. It still didn't really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.
My vocation is more in composition really than anything else-building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army. ... I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened. ... I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising. ... I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.
It just kind of continues to be strange and interesting to me to try to understand what other people are looking for. And this also just comes from getting older. You look at the stuff certainly that's coming out of Hollywood these days, and you go, "Did what came out of Hollywood when I was a kid make more sense, or was it just that I was in the demographic then?" But I certainly feel increasingly confused and disconnected from it.
I lived in Hollywood and, ironically, I didn't know you could just go out and get an agent and go on auditions and try and become an actor, I thought it was like a Masonic thing, like a blood line you had to belong to – until I was 13. Then I realised what you had to do. It is the one thing I know I want to do for the rest of my life.
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.
It's so easy to focus on what could go wrong, on what else you could do before you try the thing you really want to do. No. Just get out there and try.
One can be respected with the truth in Hollywood just as much as anywhere else you know or else I wouldn't have had a career.
I worked out of Hollywood for 10 years and I had my heart broken half a dozen times, so I know all the things that can go wrong.
Like every audition I go on, I do my best, but after that, I let it go because, you know, the rejection rate is so great in Hollywood, and I can only control what I do in the audition, and after that it's up to somebody else.
I never had a desire to leave mainstream Hollywood. And still don't think that I've left mainstream Hollywood.
I've never had help from anyone, ever. I've never had this great director who saw themselves in me, because I'm a French woman in Hollywood. Who could identify with me as a successful director in Hollywood? Nobody. And the few people who could have been mentors, instead they just stole my ideas.
I had so many other things I could fall back on as an entrepreneur (with multiple businesses). When I finally was true to myself and what I wanted to do - and acting was it - there was nothing else I could think of. I thought "If I fail, I'm falling hard (because) I don't have anything else to fall back on. Am I going to accept that?"...I never looked back. I never (let myself) put it in my mind to fail.
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