Unattainable Success Quotes

If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.

I'm not going to be one of the guys who hangs around if he doesn't have a road to the title.

We're in a world and a society where we're all striving for this perfection that doesn't exist.

If we were to use the success of 'Need You Now' as the barometer for every other song, then we'll probably be highly disappointed. That song will probably undoubtedly be the biggest song of our career. We can hopefully have success for 20 years, but we may not ever have the success of that one particular song again.

Do I think anything I ever do will be as big as Motley Crue? It's impossible.

The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.

It's hard to be in the shadow of a Beyonce.

I try not to want any one specific thing to happen because that's then bound to probably not happen. Particularly in Hollywood, I try not to set my hopes on anything.

Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little.

It's frustrating when you make the efforts but the conditions are not there to make a great tournament.

The biggest fish he ever caught were those that got away.

Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.

I don't work very much, and I just sit here waiting for a script that I can't refuse - and I'm not talking about money.

Something that is completely unwinnable. I mean, it becomes unwinnable if we decide to leave [Afghanistan].

It’s a cruel jest to ask a bootless man to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.

You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, 'I'm a writer,' it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father.

No one can really honestly be the very best, no one.

I think the story of DiMaggio was alluring precisely for its impossibility.

If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.

The longing to produce great inspirations didn't produce anything but more longing.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can't become athletes. We're watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

The late '90s were a really bad time for people trying to be rock stars, you know what I mean? It seemed like everyone was a one-hit wonder on the radio. We had friends who had a hit single on the radio and sold 500,000 records, and then they couldn't get arrested a year later. I had this feeling at the time that that was not possible anymore, so the idea of becoming the biggest band in the country—it seemed laughable. I felt that having those sort of ambitions was foolish, because there was no way that was going to be possible. If you saw it that way, you were just deluding yourself.

My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.

With all the awards I've won, you'd think that I'd at least be able to make a living. It's a really terrible situation.