Top 100 My Own Work Quotes
#1. I start work by spending time in personal Bible study. Because my projects center on a question in my own faith walk, I find Bible study essential. And God gives me scriptures daily that speak to the question with which I'm struggling.
Francine Rivers
#2. I'll be honest with you. I'm a little bit of a loner. It's been a big part of my maturing process to learn to allow people to support me. I tend to be very self-reliant and private. And I have this history of wanting to work things out on my own and protect people from what's going on with me.
Kerry Washington
#3. To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work ... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#4. I've never had a very quiet voice. I tried in choir to make it smaller, and it just didn't work out. And I listened to a lot of soul music when I was growing up on my own accord. But I was mostly into Mama Cass and Gladys Knight, and they all had big voices too; just different than mine.
Beth Ditto
#5. I have a great work ethic - from watching Lucille Ball, not necessarily my own family.
Jenny Lewis
#6. I think everybody goes off and does their own vision. And I don't take responsibility for other people's work, frankly. It's bad enough taking responsibility for my own.
Wes Craven
#7. I don't want to have these burdens. But I can't bear to turn them over to anyone else, either. Because, despite all the work, I like being in control of my own life.
Robin Hobb
#8. If you steal other people's characters, it doesn't work with the context of the scripts and what is written, so I wanted to make her my own. I was petrified, in the beginning, because it's such an iconic character, especially being a young lady myself.
Tamsin Egerton
#9. I am a serious artist in my own right, in the sense that I've spent my entire life being an artist and trying to be an artist and making work.
David Shrigley
#10. Value work. But not any kind of work. Ask yourself "Is the work vital, strengthening my own character, or inspiring others, or helping the world?".
Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay
#11. All my photographs seep through EMOTION , through the relationship I establish with the place I am portraying. Whenever I see something that captivates me, I start turning around it to find MY OWN frame. I work on myself and on the city at the same time.
Augusto De Luca
#12. I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose.
Jane Green
#13. I never considered myself more able than anybody because I had problems just like anybody else. When I practiced, I solved problems, like any of my fellow students. I looked at my own work, and looked ahead, with blinders, almost.
Marc-Andre Hamelin
#14. One thing I hope I'll never be is drunk with my own power. And anybody who says I am will never work in this town again.
Jim Carrey
#15. I've always wanted children ... not of my own, but for yard work and reaching into tight places to get things I've dropped.
Dov Davidoff
#16. I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.
Jason Isbell
#17. When I think of how we show faith, I cannot help but think of the example of my own father. I recall vividly how the spirit of missionary work came into my life. I was about thirteen years of age when my father received a call to go on a mission.
Ezra Taft Benson
#18. My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#19. I was so lucky that I didn't have anyone to copy, be impressed by. I had developed my own style, I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work until I was around thirty.
Shel Silverstein
#20. I'm on a single track here - I work to direct what I want to see onstage. I basically have been feeding my own needs - to be working on a specific project at a specific time, and fortunately more often it works than fails.
Harold Prince
#21. I hate incompetence. I think it's probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn't make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary.
Ayn Rand
#22. At breakfast one Saturday I decided to tell Hank my desire to go back to work. He explodes, 'What can you do? You can't make enough to buy your own Kotex
Martha Lemasters
#23. At the end of the day, my life isn't about other people's work. I've got to stop giving stuff away. I've got my own stories to tell, and a great need to tell them. I've got these images, these thoughts in my head, and I need to find a way to cope with them.
Paddy Considine
#24. My work is trying to at least define myself on my own terms, and then if other people enjoy things that's a lovely addition.
Bo Burnham
#25. I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.
Walt Disney
#26. I don't get that many scripts. Back in Australia, I've pretty much done my own shows and really no work outside of that. It's only now that I'm starting to read some Hollywood film scripts, and I've read some really great ones.
Jason Gann
#27. My issues with it are that simply in terms of my own work. It represents 30 years of output. And some of the things, some of the pieces I've used there, when I first wrote them, they seemed probably very menacing, and I hear them now, and they're just kind of pleasant, if that's the word.
Richard Meltzer
#28. I come from a really big family, my father was a businessman and what he always instilled in us was to be your own boss. My father built up his business, and he was by no means a rich man, but he figured out how to work four-and-a-half days a week.
Tony Shalhoub
#29. I don't work with a stylist, I don't work with a glam squad to get me together for the red carpet, I really enjoy the time it takes to do it myself, to choose my clothes and do my own makeup and my own hair.
Dita Von Teese
#30. I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11.
Adam Michnik
#31. I guess when I look over my shoulder at other designers, I feel like people are so definitive. It's so clear to me what their aesthetic is, what they're projecting. And I look at my own work and I think, Who could ever decipher what the hell is going on?
Marc Jacobs
#32. My own life would make a pretty dull story, I think, and I envy him as I drive to work on a cold Minnesota morning across the Mississippi River with its coal barges still struggling upstream like so many of us nowadays.
Garrison Keillor
#33. I work out with our trainer, Jocelynne Boschen of Alpha Sport L.A., hike a lot, and eat healthy. I love cooking so prepare a lot of my own food and avoid processed foods. No fast food. No soda.
Elizabeth Banks
#34. I don't really measure success by anything other than if I am happy. That is success to me. Am I happy waking up every morning? And despite the challenges of running my own business, do I look forward to going to work? Absolutely.
L'Wren Scott
#35. Recording a song for a film doesn't take much time; it's hardly an hour's job, but concerts are constant, and so is travelling, so I've to take time out to work on my albums because I'm passionate about creating my own music. When you love something dearly, you set your priorities accordingly.
Kailash Kher
#36. My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.
Kathleen Rooney
#37. I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.
Barry Hannah
#38. I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness -of perfection.
Agnes Martin
#39. I'm obviously very involved with my own charity and foundation that I work with. Obviously, I'm very passionate about that.
David Nail
#40. I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.
Madonna
#41. There are people I would like to work with. It's a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I can't really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.
Robert Wyatt
#42. My relationship to eating, my relationship to critiquing my own shape, all of that has changed since I've started viewing my body much more as a tool to do my work.
Lena Dunham
#43. I have never been able to carry out any work coolly. On the contrary it is done, so to speak, with my own blood.
Jim Dine
#44. If you're not getting work, make your own work. I think that's a good mentality. I suppose I take my drive from my mother and my practicality from my father.
Sophie Kennedy Clark
#45. I feel like I'm pretty good but I don't like to toot my own horn, you know. I want to let the work speak for itself and kind of move on to the next thing.
Christian Bale
#46. I know from my own experience that great films and great actors can have a really big influence on you. There is a place for art in the world, and if you're lucky enough to be good at something and to keep being given work, it's not such a bad thing.
Sally Hawkins
#47. I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work with, all these fabulous women, 'Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.' I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple.
Sheryl Sandberg
#48. I'm my own hero on the sets; why should I work with other heroes? The Khans did not want to work with me when I started. Why should I work with them now?
Kangana Ranaut
#49. I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.
J.M. Coetzee
#50. I looked at what my talents and desires are and decided to start my own business. I like the advantage of being able to work at a slower pace if I need to do that and there is no one pressuring me to work faster
Rhonda Byrne
#51. My job as an actress is to make things work and come up with reasons of my own and not just fill in the blanks for anybody else, you know what I mean?
Amy Adams
#52. When I have my manuscript finished, more or less, I type it myself, with two fingers. I type fast with two fingers. And then when it's ready, I reread, recorrect, and retype it. Everything is my own work. I do not give it to secretaries or to typists.
Elie Wiesel
#53. I liked being able to work with all the different producers and take what they brought to the table and bring my own style to it.
Clay Aiken
#54. The expectation was I would get married and become a mother and settle down. We didn't have any role models. We saw teachers and doctors and nurses, but I'm not a teacher, and there was no possibility of being a doctor or a nurse. I had to work and find my own way.
Alexis Wright
#55. I want my children to be able to meet and play and communicate with many other children on their own, not only when they are driven somewhere. I want them to grow up in an environment that is not just a place where people sleep but where people work.. and where people enjoy themselves.
Moshe Safdie
#56. To me the desire to create and to have control over your own life, irrespective of the politics of the time or social structures, has always been a part of the human spirit. What I did not fully realize was that work could open the doors to my heart.
Anita Roddick
#57. I am very hands on doing my own work, all my own stunt work.
Jodi Lyn O'Keefe
#58. For me, the Earth had always been a kind of a safe haven, you know, where I could go to work or be in my home or take my kids to school. But I realized it really wasn't that. It really is its own spaceship. And I had always been a space traveler.
Michael J. Massimino
#59. My dad died when I was three so my mom had to raise four kids on her own, and I think there's a part of me that pulls upon having watched my mom do that our whole lives. She had to make it work.
Leslie Bibb
#60. My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.
Brian Ferneyhough
#61. As a director, I really wanted to learn and I needed to get away from my own stuff to figure out how to just do things and work with good people.
Paul Feig
#62. I'd always found goodness more interesting then evil, though I was aware this wasn't the most general view. To my mind, it took more work and more courage to be good, an opinion continually reinforced by my own shortcomings.
Dick Francis
#63. I love it when a photographer lets me create my own movement and feeling to the images. By that I mean he doesn't restrict me in his or her own ideas but rather gives me a direction and lets me work within those boundaries freely.
Kylie Bax
#64. I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can't feel anymore.
John Bradshaw
#65. I believe in me, in my view of the world. I believe in my responsibility for my own destiny, guilt for my own sins, merit for my own good deeds, determination of my own life. I don't believe in miracles, I believe in hard work.
Philippa Gregory
#66. In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.
Mary Oliver
#67. If you are like me, you may have strong longings from time to time for the mighty working of the holy Spirit in your life...But what I have found most often in my own life is the failure to open myself to the full measure of the Spirit's work by believing the promises of God.
John Piper
#68. My own theory is that people are just so desperate for somebody they can feel better than, in America. Now that everyone's going broke and working 17 jobs - if they have one at all - at least they can look at these guys behind bars and think, "At least I get to wear my own clothes to work."
Jerry Stahl
#69. I love Monet: his 'Water Lilies' would look great on my wall. But would I prefer to see money helping kids get better from cancer rather than spending it on a work of art for my own personal indulgence? Yes, I probably would.
Bonnie Langford
#70. I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives.
Linda Sue Park
#71. It's much harder, much more work to be your own artist, and it's hard for me to just want to do one thing. I love doing my own music, but I really have to get into a groove with it, which has been difficult over the last few years because I've had so much great work coming in.
Gail Ann Dorsey
#72. Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.
Aimee Bender
#73. In my own work, I've tried to anticipate what's coming over the horizon, to hasten its arrival, and to apply it to people's lives in a meaningful way.
Paul Allen
#74. My own beauty routine is influenced pretty heavily from my 'Mad Men' routine. If I'm in the series of work, it's hard to see myself without eyelashes every day.
Jessica Pare
#75. If anything, hearing another poet is a sacred experience I enter, but I can honestly say this does not influence my own work.
Grace Cavalieri
#76. I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.
Ben Marcus
#77. You go where the work is. It can be in my own back yard, Israel, Spain, or Yugoslavia. We may have the greatest technical efficiency in the world, but our artistic values are not necessarily the best.
Lee Van Cleef
#78. I think sports gave me the first place where this awkward girl could feel comfortable in my own skin. I think that's true for a lot of women-sports gives you a part of your life where you can work at something and you look in the mirror and you like that person.
Teri McKeever
#79. I feel that every professional is the art school for the next guy. I feel that maybe a lot of the dynamism in my own work, having been felt by the rest of the artists, they'll react to it and put elements of that in their own work, feeling that it'll help it.
Jack Kirby
#80. A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.
Susan Sontag
#82. In my opinion, works of art should be viewed as gifts; something precious given from a point of empathy, where personal enrichment is vastly superior to the value of the gift, and the giver begs for nothing but for the gift to shine on its own.
Kevin Focke
#83. I'm as much my own master as anyone can be, without being the master of others. I can write anywhere - all I need is a couple of hours of solitude and a computer, and I can write a chapter. Since my work is portable, I can live anywhere I like.
Stuart Woods
#84. I find it hard to work with other musicians because I know from experience that when they play, they play with their feeling, and that restricts me because I know I want to play in my own particular way.
Enya
#86. I think everyone has their own style in journalism. Look, I'm a girl from the South! Sometimes I laugh. Someone can pejoratively call it giggling. But if you look at the body of my work, I ask lots of hard questions and break a lot of hard news.
Sarah Lacy
#87. Getting married has certainly made a massive difference to my own life. So I am committed to giving support for family finances and having the right policies for work-life balance that make it easier for couples to have a rich family life.
Gordon Brown
#88. The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.
Mandy Patinkin
#89. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
W. H. Auden
#90. I definitely intend to create my own work in the future so that we don't have to keep saying, We don't have work for black women.'
Lupita Nyong'o
#91. I've always been careful to put out the very best work I can. One of the things I value the most is the love and faith that people have given me over the years, so I try to live up to their expectations and my own standards of what I'm capable of.
Jackie DeShannon
#92. There's nothing that compares with the time spent all by myself on a creation that is all my own. I still think of my solo work as my 'home planet' in comics, though I've learned to listen much more to editors and trusted friends for feedback.
Nate Powell
#93. you make me want to know what goes on in that head of yours. I'll be honest: I'm not usually interested in the contents of others people's heads. My own is work enough.
Julie Buxbaum
#94. I was kind of an unhappy kid. I always felt like a cynical New Yorker trapped in a little kid's body. I started to get some pretty bad anxiety disorders around puberty, which totally did not work with growing up a mile away from the beach. I started cutting my own hair.
Rachel Bloom
#95. I am not a librarian of my own work. It's a good thing not to be involved with what you have done.
Mick Jagger
#96. I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Paul Auster
#97. I was part of a writers' collective with 21 writers and filmmakers called the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. We had our own office space in this old converted dog and cat hospital, and we had a basketball hoop outside. I'd bring my dog to work every day and write.
Noah Hawley
#98. I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
Octavia E. Butler
#99. I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don't love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I've been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.
Anne Lamott
#100. Slowly I learn the importance of powerlessness. I experience it in my own life and I live with it in my work. The secret is not to be afraid of it - not to run away. The dying know that we are not God ... All they ask is that we do not desert them.
Sheila Cassidy
