Quotes About Ambition

I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.

I wanted to be a novelist for so long.

The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.

I was one of those kids who never wanted to be anything but a novelist. And I don't know a lot of people who truly live the life that they dreamed of.

You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading 'The Agony and the Ecstasy,' about Michelangelo, and saying, 'No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.' I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort.

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.

In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.

As a young, ambitious novelist, writing for kids never crossed my mind.

I've always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative.

Why does any novelist keep writing long after they've made money? Because they've failed to write the perfect novel.

My whole life, I've wanted to be a novelist.

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn't want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I'd find to screw it up.

If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.

As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.

When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.

I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didn't know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.

I plan to live to be 98, so I'll be the guy at Dundas and Yonge flogging a box of mouldy novels.

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

When you're a kid, you think 'Oh, it's so great. I'm going to go to Hollywood. I'm going to go to Broadway.' For a long time, it was such a novelty.