Quotes About Ambition

So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.

Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved

La gente è venuta in questo paese per cercare soldi o libertà. Se non hai i soldi, ti aggrappi ancora più rabbiosamente alle tue libertà.

And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions.

If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.

He'd come to Los Angeles to break into the movies as a writer. His soul was still alive then, but he'd met a girl who had dreams of her own, and one thing led to another, and now he was just another member of the goddamned middle class, suckering people for living.

Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn't know it was the apex.

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

Sometimes you imagine something for so long, you find that you have no choice but to do it.

Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.

Well, just remember," Gary said, "there's more to life than cooking. You're at a stage now where you need to start thinking about what you really want and how you're going to get it.

He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

Einar had been attracted to the Communist notion that his labor was being exploited by East Coast capitalists. Then one day, listening to a Communist fulminate in Pioneer Square, he'd had a eureka moment in which he realized that the way to get ahead in his new country was to exploit some labor himself.

It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn't sure she would.

exercise his brain and keep him fed, but how to gain any traction? Books, he thought. Books, books, books. Books to get him somewhere. Books to turn him into someone. Books to grab hold of on his way up. Books as a way to be alone without feeling so alone.

She was here to get rich and richer and then get out from under these men, not to accommodate mediocre mumbling coves. A man should be able to afford his own expulsions.

Balzac's assertion, which my mother also quoted, that behind every great fortune was a great crime

It's true I didn't love the job, but I did want the money. If I was too incompetent for ordinary work, I would have to do something extraordinary or face destruction.

We spent our lives making livings.

I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.

My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. OK, but this is not for me, and it will not be for Little Igor.

You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren't finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren't making you rich. But they were making the world rich

It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing?

I am a mother, she thought—not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity.