Failed Ambition Quotes

I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher; that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.

In Sochi, I felt like I lost a gold.

I've accepted that I was a failure in politics. I was not qualified for the job.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

The Roses should have made it as the biggest band since The Beatles, but we didn't.

I had no plans to be a writer. My teenaged bid for stardom was to be a pop star... which, ahem, didn't exactly work out.

I dreamed of turning pro as an Olympic medallist but I ended up turning pro as the kid who failed to make the Olympics.

I wanted to be Anthony Hopkins and ended up being neither a film star nor having a career on the stage.

If I hadn't made it as an actor, I might have wound up a hood.

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

I didn't make any mark on Barcelona. It was a blip in my career in terms of what I did as a coach.

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

I am a failed visual artist.

The only thing I daydreamed about was being an opera singer. But I was so skinny and so pathetic that that sort of wasn't going to happen.

I'm gutted, devastated that in front of my own fans I've lost my belt.

Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

Without naming names, you can take some of the biggest artists of the last 25-30 years and point to those moments where they thought they were going to be movie stars, put the entire weight of a film on their back, and it failed. And some of them didn't recover from that.

After all, didn't I blow a magnificent career?

I guess I did go through my phase where I wanted to be a rapper. I made music, but I was never really good at it.

I just wanted to write about music if I wasn't going to make it.

I kind of knew. I said, 'Yeah, I'm not going to be able to play in the NBA. That's just not going to happen. Let that dream go.'

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

My father had a difficult relationship with success, maybe because he never obtained it. But he was very wise about it because he observed how you can become rotten fruit once you get power.

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.