Bruce Vilanch Quotes

Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary.

I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.

We've pitched and even begun development on a number of fantasy worlds that have never seen the light of day. All of those worlds... It's soul-crushing to see them sputter out, one by one. Lost. Like tears. In rain.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

Not to sound too pessimistic, but I just don't see me having the film career that I maybe hoped for after 'The Birdcage.' I think people just didn't know what to do with me.

If somebody sent me a good script, I would do it, and I mean that, but it never happens. Not once. I can't even point to an exception.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

Sometimes, I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to.

I do feel a bit dejected about my film career. I am sad that it didn't take off as expected. I didn't get my due as an actor. I have an attractive personality and good looks. But I don't know what went wrong? You need to stop thinking about such things and move on.

Everyone's a millionaire where promises are concerned.

I wanted to cry because it took me so many years

I suppose it's amazing when you think how many things people get involved in that don't work.

I'm 47 years old, and I have to accept the fact that I'm probably not going to set the world on fire... If I was going to do that, I would have done it by now.

Tomorrow, every Fault is to be amended; but that Tomorrow never comes.

I trained myself to not get my hopes up, because there were so many times in the room where you'd be like, 'This feels amazing, this is a hit!' And it never saw the light of day.

I was supposed to be a doctor. I was supposed to go to Princeton. And everything I was supposed to do I didn't.

For a long time, I felt like I failed myself, my career, and my record company.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

Nothing ever comes out the way I hope it will. That first vision, that initial vision you have of a book, what it's going to be like when it's done, it begins to go wrong the second you start to write.

It's always disappointing when your work is not received as you hope it would be.

When I left college, I though that I would be immediately embraced by the film world and instead found myself sitting in a squat for three years not knowing what to do with my life.

Many feel discouraged because they have not measured up to their potential.

I turned 30 as a janitor. I was thinking at the time that Hank Williams died when he was 29. All my peers were at least 10 years younger than I was. I felt like an old has-been at the time.