Top 70 Day Job Quotes

Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn’t believe I’d actually get to do it for a living.

In 2008, after holding down a day job for all of six weeks, I gave up on the whole job thing to pursue an online business. At the time, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I figured if I was going to be broke and miserable, I might as well be while working on my own terms.

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won’t have another book finished by next week.

I will be doing a lot of human interest interviews. It involves empathising and listening. Which is a lot of what my day job is about. And, frankly, the priesthood isn’t without its element of showbusiness.

If you’re going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you’ve got to have a day job.

I loved publishing; I loved working in the book industry, but I’ve been writing pretty much nonstop since I was 19. I realized very early on that I would need a day job, and I wanted one that was in books.

No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody.

I’ve got so much going on in my day job. And I’ve been around politics enough to know all the swirl that’s fit to print, and so I focus on the reality of the here and now.

You should never quit your day job.

I think I started lip-synching about halfway through the first day, and it’s not as easy as you think it would be. But it’s definitely better than a day job.

I always liked movies, so I started writing for Hollywood, but my day job was physics.

I’ve always had a day job and never been just acting.

My parents always taught me that my day job would never make me rich; it’d be my homework.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone – male or female. You don’t get to quit your day job.

Up until 1995, I still had a day job that I hated. I was still personally involved in things in the 90s.

I was frustrated because I couldn’t get going, as I was trying to figure out how to make films. I had various jobs, I taught a SAT class, I was a bartender, I had a day job at an office and was making short films.

I want to let everyone hear my music and enjoy it, but just as long as it’s fun. I’ll go as far as until it gets too much like a day job.

I am very lucky that I get to go to work and laugh all day for my day job, and then go home and torture my artistic self.

I can’t wait to front my band with these new songs and play for fans, but I’ve decided to keep my day job too.

I didn’t want a day job anymore, so I somehow made the jewelry line work. Now that I look back on it, it was, like, the dumbest idea ever. Everyone and their mother has a jewelry line, so in retrospect, maybe not the smartest fallback plan. But it ended up working out great!

Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you’re 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you.

I won’t give up my day job of design.

I review books as a day job, and through the years I’ve come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.

We’ve had a difficult legacy of 40 years, and cleaning up is not going to be a one day job. But we are engaged in a systematic effort, we have not allowed formation of new militia groups, and we are reforming the local police systematically so that there won’t be abuse.

My day job is that I write songs for other artists and if I’m not on the road I’m in my studio.

My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants. The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.

My dream of dreams is to write Broadway musicals. All of this Twitter and TV writing is just a day job.

I still have a day job, so I don’t think I’ll be a full-time Shark, but if they ever invited me back, I’d be more than happy to do it.

I consider acting a day job – it’s not my dream; it’s not my be-all, end-all.

I’m in a rock band – I don’t have a day job! I am spoiled… a lot.

I would recommend, definitely, developing a ‘day job’ that you like – don’t expect to make money writing!

When you get successful, the money comes in and pretty soon you’ve got to hire an accountant, you’ve got to get up early, and then you’ve got a day job.

Real estate is my life. It is my day job, if you will. But it consumes my nights and weekends, too.

Really, my biggest risk was just the initial step to quit my day job to do music. I was packaging and shipping for an art gallery in Manhattan; I went to school for painting, so I always wanted to work around artwork, even though I wasn’t really contributing anything to the scene.

I’ve been crazy lucky that I’ve never had a day job. I get really close to having no money, then I always wind up getting some kind of great job.

When I first quit my day job, I was terrified. I called my editors and said I’m trying to make a go of this, and they threw every contract at me they could. And for two years, I had a book or an anthology out every month.

My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.

Hollywood is my day job.

I was a sound engineer. That was my day job when I started writing.

I was a sign language interpreter from when I was 17, but I don’t do that anymore. Both of my parents were deaf. I grew up in a deaf household. I don’t do any jokes about it really, but yeah that was my day job.

I’m an astrophysicist and a professor, so my day job involves manipulating intractable numbers that characterize our universe.

I have a day job. I can make movies when I want to.

I have a day job where I make money and satisfy my self-esteem. Writing is for fun, and I want to keep it that way.

If you want to provide for your family, maybe show business is not a high degree of success. You will need to keep your day job until you make it, and know it’s an odds thing just like the NFL. I personally wouldn’t recommend anybody to go into this business.

For me, the day job comes first. That’s why I call myself a diplomat who writes, not a writer who masquerades as a diplomat. If the day job demands it, I won’t write at all. I write in what I call ‘the crevices of my day job’, and that comes only on weekends.

I’ve never had a day job. I’ve been very fortunate.

I worked in an office. I was like an assistant. So, I would just answer phone calls, coordinate events. It was a great day job. I worked with amazing people, but obviously, whenever you are doing something that’s not your dream, you kind of feel like, ‘Oh, I’m on this grind.’

I’m not trying to conquer Hollywood. I love my day job.

I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine – eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days.

I’d much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job.

My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.

I call ‘Community’ the best day job in the world, because between takes, I get to write music. I get to write sketches. I get to write movies. It’s the best job ever.

As soon as I got into music, I tried to be a working, real artist who gets paid for what he does, who doesn’t have a day job.

My personal challenge as an artist has been having a day job which is intellectually satisfying and fun – and thus can easily supplant the desire to make art.

I’m not nervous coming back to my old audience. I’m looking forward to it. That’s really what I do; that’s my day job.

Listen, my day job is also Chief Creative Officer for Marvel, and it’s a very painful job because we publish a lot of books, and there are things I see where I can punch people out. Therefore, we have some new people now, and the kids are going to read our books.

I’m terrified of having to go back to a day job. And that’s why I’m training like a man possessed. Because I want to keep winning.

All musicians need a day job in the beginning. Unless they still live with their parents, I guess. I’m just lucky that my day job is simply another form of art.

I would say the biggest difference is that a movie is a shorter, more encapsulated experience, and a TV job is like having a regular day job where you get to do what you love.

A band’s first album’s usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.

To me, success was not having to have a boss and not having a day job. I’ve been living my own version of success since the early ’90s when I first got signed. I haven’t had a job since then.

I have a day job Monday to Friday. I work at a record label in Brooklyn called Ba Da Bing. It’s a great indie label and I listen to music all day. I meet people online and find out about the cool new music blogs.

I had a bike as a kid, and when I worked in Manhattan – I had a 10-speed – I rode from downtown to 68th and Madison for my day job. I knew about fighting traffic, but nothing about racing.

I need to feel like the work I’m doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.

When Joy Division started, I was scared to death of having to get a normal day job.

‘Last Man Standing’ has been an amazing treat because it is the best day job you could have because we laugh every day. It lightened me up a bit because I tend to go to some dark places.

My life is not separate from my music, you know? It’s not like a day job that I leave and go home. It’s who I am as a person and how I am trying to grow, come closer to God, be a better person.

I’m in a great place because I trust people behind the camera as I go off, and I still go back to my day job and do film.

My focus is 100 percent on my day job, on the state of Arizona.

When I was 13, I forged my date of birth so that I could get a Saturday job at Woolworth’s, earning £1 3s 6d for the day. But my real ambition was to do something in the music world – or, at least, close to it.