Aya Cash quotes:

In school I really loved Shakespeare, and I participated in a country-wide Shakespeare competition.

I didn't have that typical high school experience of feeling ashamed of who I was. I once wore a superman cape and pajamas, and I thought that was awesome - and some people didn't! But some people did, and it was an arts high school, so nobody made me feel bad about who I was.

What you learn in any acting class is how to make a fool of yourself and enjoy things and get out of your head.

Offers come up, but I'm still fighting for jobs and auditioning and being rejected.

I feel crushingly embarrassed when I do bad work, so being rejected after doing bad work is actually harder than being rejected after doing good work.

Most of my comedy is accidental, I would say. If I don't know what the joke is, I'm going to play it better than if I do.

I think that it's a myth that there's one job that makes your whole career, unless you're winning an Oscar. But even that doesn't work for some people.

You never know what's going to happen, so you just continue with your head down and never expect things to start being handed to you.

You have to find something you relate to in every character.

I don't need to be crazy rich and crazy famous. I would just like to keep going.

There are problems everywhere, of course, but you can only see those certain problems when you reach a certain level. So I try to think of those problems as, "This is a sign that I'm having success, that I'm also having issues with this."

Acting was something I wanted to work at and put the time into.

I work constantly to be better at being rejected.

You have to be kinder to yourself, because it's a part of being good.

I always knew that I'd probably do something in the arts.

For years while I was working as a waitress, all I wanted to do was get on a TV show. You think, "This will solve all the problems. I'm making more than 400 dollars a week; I don't have to worry about money ever again," but it's just not true.

There's been no nepotism in my acting artistic life, but I think it's been pretty clear in my writing life. I knew what a pantoum was at age 11 - I knew form - therefore I would win the poetry contest. But I also realized that I would never be a great writer.

Sometimes the characters that I'm most resistant to are the ones that I find the most satisfying to play, because you have to dig deeper and you have to find different parts of yourself that are not necessarily the first thing you access and that's fun and interesting.

No one is trying to be bad for the sake of being bad - there's always a reason behind it.

You know what, maybe I just want a different kind of life. Maybe I want to open an antique store and coffee shop, and have a different kind of life.

I really don't have a specific idea of where I want my career to go, I just have an idea of wanting to continue to work and work on things that I like and think are good.

I've always just shown up to set and said the lines, [but] I want to help develop scripts and help cast and help bring a visual tone to something.

I don't know if I'll ever direct, but producing is dipping my toe into my behind-the-scenes world.

The thing I'd miss most is the feeling when acting is going well, when you start a play and you end the night and you look back and go, "What just happened?"

The worst feeling in the world is giving a bad audition.

Even though I'm on a show that I love with people that I love - I have basically the dream job - that doesn't mean I'm not getting rejected on a daily basis.

I've seen some of my favorite actors give bad performances, and I have to tell myself that failure is a part of success.

I wanted to be a writer for a while. I was an excellent child writer. I won multiple poetry contests. I was published at age three - I think that was more about novelty than my immense talent.

Being an actor is definitely not the hardest job in the world - it's definitely a first-world problem to have, but I'm not very good with rejection. I constantly question whether or not I'm suited for this business, because it is your job to get rejected.

The reason actors are assholes is because they don't eat.

Even in success, you're going to be constantly rejected.

We're all eaters. That's our bond. Let's be real.

As you get older and you progress in your career, you start to want to have more control over things and you have ideas.

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.

If I had a child and she was a girl, I'd hope she'd do something different from me.

We live in a time where improv is king and people love improv, and I think there's a time and a place for that and people who are really good at structuring improv.

Both of my parents were incredibly supportive of me being in any arts, because they were both in the arts. They weren't the typical story of, "Oh, get a real job. You need to make money." They basically said, "Yup, be an artist. You'll be broke your whole life but you'll be happy."

There's innate competition, I think, between mothers and daughters - mine no more so than anyone else.

I think it's very hard to go into the same business as your family when you're an artist.