Peter Ackroyd Quotes

I wanted to be a huge star and I have failed.

I wish I was a great writer or a great journalist or a great scientist or a great artist; I'm not.

If I had an extra 20 or 50 years physically, I could have been the dancer of my dreams. But I never became that dancer.

I wanted to be a serious actress, but of course that didn't really happen.

The only thing I'd ever wanted in my life was to be a major-league ballplayer, but I had to admit to myself that I wasn't good enough. It broke my heart.

Many feel discouraged because they have not measured up to their potential.

You never forget the feeling of not getting to the World Series. Yes, it sticks with you.

I know people who've had dreams unrealised due to circumstances.

Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary.

I was told once if I kept breaking things on my legs, that I wasn't going to be able to walk soon, you know? I wanted to be a pro skateboarder, but it was too hard. I was trying, but it wasn't going to happen.

There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.

Sometimes I feel like a has-been who never was.

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins.

I had planned to accomplish something considerable, and this is the end.

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

I could have had class. I could have been a contender.

My character, Rick Spleen, is a what-if version of me, really, where nothing did quite turn out right and everything else is still around the corner.

What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.

It is better to be a has-been than a never-was.

On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.

I intended to be famous by the time I was 16 and rich by the time I was 20. Curiously, it didn't pan out!

I thought nothing would ever happen for me. My whole life had been geared toward being a singer, and it wasn't clicking.

There was a telemarketing job one summer in high school that I was rejected for. I still walk by the building that I actually had the interview in. It's still in New York, and I always think about that job and why I didn't get it.