Quotes About Ambition

She was sure she wasn't ever going to go Hollywood, so she went.

Though I have no kids and Hollywood doesn't exist, I firmly believe, however, that it did exist. And like Rome, we are living amidst the fallen columns and clothes-lined courtyards, in the ruins of an empire of the self-enchanted which was once, briefly, more devastating than Caesar's and still brings respectable families to a hot, windy intersection in August to sigh with unnoticed despondence, "…Well…here we are…Hollywood and Vine.

She could get published in a sound journal that meant business and didn't publish fly-by-nights. She was twenty-eight. It was time for her to O.D., not get published.

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.

She's going to UCLA in the fall to major in psychology, and I guess after that she'll be more revolting than ever.

I bumped into every kind of disappointment, and was frustrated at every turn. Roles promised me were given to other players, pictures that offered me a chance were shelved, no one was particularly interested in me, and I had not developed a strength of personality to make anyone believe I had special talents. I wanted so desperately to succeed that I drove myself relentlessly, taking no time off for pleasures, or for friendships." - Jean Arthur

And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue - you know - of the future of a so-called 'deaf' musician. And I just couldn't quite accept that.

La sfera politica e del potere deve essere, per la sua stessa natura e funzione, libera da condizionamenti economici. Potrebbe venire ricordata opportunamente la frase di Siila, il quale disse non essere, la sua ambizione, possedere vasellame d'oro, ma avere il potere su coloro che lo posseggono.

A lot of parents tell their children that if they want to be an actor, that's fine, but they should do something else first, so they've got something to fall back on. It doesn't work like that, as far as I'm concerned.

If you're suddenly doing something you don't want to do for four years, just so you've got something to fall back on, by the time you come out you don't have that 16-year-old drive any more and you'll spend your life doing something you never wanted to do in the first place.

Great minds have sought you--lacking someone else. You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing

the enemies of promise.

The chief thing is desire. You've really got to want to do it, you've really got to want to tell that story. And you have to be able to set goals for yourself to get it done.

Rich, but not Trump-rich.

I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.

Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.

I was shocked at the revelation of her vaulting ambition, her greed. I should have loathed her or, knowing what kind of a person she was, I should have realized the futility of any personal attachment, the impossibility of its maturing into something warm, human enduring. By then, I had known a bit of the prostitute's psychology, the ruthlessness which marked her relationship with men but I ignored these.

I am a commuter, not between the city and the village, although I do this frequently; not between the inane idealism of the classroom and the stifling reality beyond it, which I must do for survival and self-respect. I am a commuter between what I am now and what I was and would like to be and it is this commuting at lightning speed, at the oddest hours, that has done havoc to me.

Passion begets hunger. Hunger consumes worlds. - Silver Surfer

You never know how far you can travel until you start walking.