A Quote by Eli Wallach

No, I never thought of it in those terms. I used to go into agents' offices and they'd have pictures of these handsome movie men and I knew I'd never be up there. I'm a journeyman actor. I didn't think about stardom.
I'm a journeyman actor. My experience as a journeyman actor is that you have to go where the work is. I've never been the lead; I've never been in that position.
The idea of a journeyman actor, people sort of say negatively - "Someone who never made it for real" - [but] I think a journeyman actor is the complete goal.
A lot of people started asking me about this woman director thing, which I never thought about before. And I'd never really thought about how there aren't really many female directors. I knew it, but I'd never really sat down and thought about the implications of that, and what it meant for a woman to make a movie, and how it's viewed differently when a woman makes a movie about women.
I've never thought of myself as a singer anyway. . . I've been free from those considerations because so many people over the years told me I don't have a voice. I kind of bought that. I never thought that much about it to begin with. I knew I didn't have one of the great voices. As my Damon Runyanesque lawyer used to say, "none of you guys can sing. If I want to hear singing, I'll go to the Metropolitan Opera."
It used to be that you kind of got pigeonholed into one thing - you're either a stage actor or a TV actor or a movie actor. Today, there's a lot of crossover with film actors doing television, which never happened before, so those lines are a little bit more blurred than they used to be.
I suddenly realized that the fellow who didn't show up was getting about fifty-times more money than I was getting. So I thought, 'this is silly,' and became an actor. I certainly never thought I'd wind up in motion pictures. That was far beyond anything I'd ever dreamed of.
I'm a long way from being evicted [at the age of 14], but I'll never forget it. I'll never forget the feeling. I'll never forget my mom crying and I'll never forget the thought I had: 'Well the only thing I can do is just go build my body,' because the men who were successful that I knew of - Stallone, Arnold, Bruce Willis - they were men of action.
'Kung Fu' was never cancelled; I just left. I decided I had enough of it, and I thought I should do a movie right away, because I think when you leave a television series, it's important that you establish the fact that you're a movie actor really quickly, or you might never get that chance.
And I never thought about how the lights don't go out, so you never really rest, in that way. I never really thought about the intensity of being watched, all the time. Those are some things that I didn't know about prison.
I'd never thought about acting as a job. I was an engineer; I was in science and technology. I loved movies and television growing up, but I'd never thought about it as, 'Oh, that guy Denzel Washington is employed as an actor.'
If I get some Bruce Lee nun-chucks that he actually used in a movie, those are going in the case. Those will never be used. Those will never be touched.
I knew the term Stepford Wife, and I knew what that meant. I never read the book, and I think before I started filming I watched the movie. I thought it was very dated.
Why did I decide to become an actor ? I decided because my brother helped me decide. I knew nothing about the entertainment industry, and never thought I actually would. I never had an interest in it. I grew up not watching many movies or rarely watching TV.
I feel like I turned down a lot of things that I wish I hadn't. But you never know when you're younger. I don't have regrets about certain things I turned down. Those films would have required things of me that would have been challenging, and they ended up being really good movies. But I was never a careerist, I never thought in those terms. I'd be like, "Oh, I'm tired. I don't want to work."
I never knew what Amazon was. I've never seen any of those series, even on cable. I've never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I'm out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there's Charlie Rose and I go to sleep.
If you look at pop culture as the main picture you see of black men, all these kind of threatening pictures and - I think those of us who are artists and who are in media have to think carefully about what those pictures are.
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