Honore de Balzac Quotes

he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

There are those who write because they believe they have something so marvelous that it will make them famous and wealthy, a lauded commodity who will be invited to a lifetime of cocktail parties.

Every man, through fear, mugs his aspirations a dozen times a day.

I met a lot of famous people when I was about 24. And none of them seemed very appealing. And so I didn't know why I would struggle to be that kind of person.

I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love. And I'm not sure why.

The incentive to ambition is the love of power.

You know, I hate to sound self-involved, but I feel like I haven't peaked yet.

I'll always struggle over saying I'm a writer, even if I won the Booker Prize.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

I was really conflicted. I had always planned to help the world. Instead, I was going to become an actress? That seemed like such a selfish thing to do.

I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

I had wanted to act since I was a kid, but I had a lot of shame attached to it. I didn't tell anyone because I didn't think it was ever a possibility.

I think the whole idea of me was that I wasn't going to be but that I wanted to be, desperately.

I always wanted to be an actor, but I was always fighting it. It never seemed that honorable to me, and I guess I was always afraid that I might fail.

All Society therefore is either for Gain, or for Glory; (i.e.) not so much for love of our Fellowes

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

I'm not that interested in just being around powerful people for the sake of it.

It's the Met Gala - everyone is huge. It feels very hierarchical, and I get really nervous in hierarchical spaces because I feel like everyone deserves to feel just as special as everyone else, but that's just not the way it is in this business.

I'm never content, and I don't know if that's a curse or a good thing.

I'm very driven, and there are lots of things I can't do.

The thing about Pablo is that he wasn't happy with what he had - just being the sixth richest man in the world. He wanted to be loved. He wanted to be accepted. He wanted to be President of Colombia; he wanted his kids to go to the same school as the Colombian elite. But he wouldn't be accepted by the elite.

I was very ambitious as a young actor, but I wasn't good at being ambitious.

It was a romantic dream to be a writer. It seemed like a calling.

..I've been trying to argue myself into thinking these things don't matter, A. Really,I have. But I've lost the argument. And I can't keep having it, when I know what the real answer is.