Nicolas Cage is a student who is on a path in cinema to try to keep learning and finding great characters with which to tell stories with. - Nicolas Cage

I always say to myself, 'I never had a career, only work.' What I mean by that is sometimes — and I won't mention names — but when you get into this career-minded perception of one's self it can be a slippery slope, and it can lead to things where you start believing in your own mythos and you start taking yourself way too seriously. You become pretentious and then you fall into the realm of diva, and that's when mistakes happen in your personal life and on camera.

I’m not career-minded. My mantra has always been “work.” I never had a “career.” I only had “work.” That was a way of going through different movies. I find something in a movie that I think works. It’s like a rock album. Maybe not all of it works in the script, but there’s one or two songs, one or two scenes that work.

Well, all art is therapeutic and a positive place to transmute emotions from the negative into a positive.