The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.
Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you're going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.
A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
I first heard Laura Branigan sing live in my brother Nesuhi's apartment, where we had gone because he had a very good piano. I immediately realized that she had a great pop voice, in the classical sense. Laura had an instinctive feel for music and melody, and her delivery was sensational. Everybody at Atlantic knew that we had a winner in this young lady, and she came through with great hits that will be remembered for many years to come. I consider Laura to be one of my best signings, and I am proud to have had such a great singer in my career in the record business. We miss her dearly.
One of the hardest things I've had to deal with in my career is keeping my material topical even though I only release albums every three or four years.
Had I been a great athlete, I'm not sure I would have even gone into coaching. I may have turned out feeling that my life ended when my athletic career ended, as happens so many times with various athletes.
Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career. It was predicted in the grooves that we would be here sometime later on down the road.
It's all about how can you take care of yourself when furthering your life's goals and ambitions, and purpose and whatever you choose - family, career - to maintain a really balanced, whole, healthy outlook.
She didn't know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you're far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other.
I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.