William Saroyan Quotes

I was 19 years old, pumping gas and going nowhere. I was kind of a high school dropout at that point because I had left school to play hockey, but no one drafted me.

It is hard when you think you can do better, but things just aren't working out.

I was never good at school, couldn't get a job. I was a disaster when I tried to do things the way the world wanted me to.

I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: "Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything's leading up to this moment." I was 18. I was like, "This is it." I didn't get it. And I was devastated.

I can think of nothing more soul destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing you want desperately to do well, and to know that you are at the best second rate.

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.

I have never been accepted. I'll never make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They're never going to let me in.

Acting is a life of rejection.

You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting... you.

I think that there were only two people in my high school that were comfortable there, and I think they are both pumping gas now.

Being bad at stuff is hard, and we all deal with it every day because we're all bad at stuff.

There's only so much you can do of trying, finding yourself very close to getting a part and then not getting it.

There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.

The times I didn't get jobs I wanted, I remember feeling dispirited - really crestfallen.

All have disappointments, all have times when it isn't worthwhile.

After three failed marriages, I know what it's like to be replaced. So that's kind of how Joey Harrington must feel today... A former No. 1 choice looks to me like he's going to be a bust in Detroit.

After hundreds of auditions and nothing, you're sitting home and wondering, 'What am I doing?'

Sometimes you just give everything you have, and you do your absolute best, and it doesn't stack up.

You go up for hundreds, thousands of roles, and you get told no, no, no, so many times.

From the time I was 16 to really up until turning 21, the roles were really, really few and far between. I had people say that I just wasn't a good singer. They didn't know what to do with me; I would never fit in any markets. I almost quit acting altogether.

I remember when I was on 'Saturday Night Live' my first year, and I wasn't getting much. I was down; I was ready to quit.

I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that nobody has been willing to buy.

I was in the wilderness of Hollywood for almost ten years. I was off the studio lists. I wasn't getting the roles offered to actors that hadn't done a third of the roles I had done or had the popularity I had.

The worst part about not playing is when you think that you are ready to do it. You try to get more minutes, taking the chances, but you end up in a situation where things have not gone well for you for weeks - or for years. That is like swimming wet clothes.