Van Wyck Brooks Quotes

To be famous and broke is hard.

I don't want to dream anymore, I want my life to be real!

When you are very idealistic, but caught in a world which is all about business, it creates anguish.

I grew up poor and used to look at people in big houses and thought they had everything. Then, later on, I looked at models in magazines and thought they had it all. When you have the ability to live that life, to some extent you find out that they don't have any magic cure for everything.

But I have learned a thing or two; I know as sure as fate, when we lock up our lives for wealth, the gold key comes too late.

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

I'd be lying if I claimed that, in spite of our amiable afternoons, I don't have an ache somewhere in my heart that my children will not be playing Carnegie Hall anytime soon.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

We secretly believe that if only we achieve some elusive goal - fitting into a pair of skinny jeans, or redoing our kitchen or getting that promotion - that it will make us happy. But the pain of our insecurity is hidden in all that racing around.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Every day I realized I would not be a star.

The reveries of youth, in which so much energy is wasted, are the yearnings of a Spirit made for what it has not found but must forever seek as an Ideal.

Destiny has two ways of crushing us - by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

My son tried to work in films and he ultimately gave it up, he finally couldn't make a living, he couldn't support himself. He worked all the time and he didn't make enough money to have a house, have an apartment.

One is forever throwing away substance for shadows.

I still have to work paycheck to paycheck. Being in show business doesn't indicate that you're a 'success,' in my opinion.

People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.

It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.

None of my friends were ever as broke as I was.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

My dad seemed comfortable with his decision to be a 'have-not,' but I knew that I wasn't.

You can work for 10 years without making it... we aren't actually all living in mansions.