Alex Haley Quotes

I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?

I have not been a success, and probably never will be.

It's a terrible thing to have to tell your fans, who have waited like Detroit's have, that their team won't win it this year. But it's better than lying to them.

Sometimes I feel like a has-been who never was.

If you're not scoring the frustrations build up.

My film directorial career has been nothing but repetition of one failure after another!

I'm most scared of failing, of disappointing people.

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

You don't want to disappoint, or feel like you're trying to recreate the magic of something.

As cricketers we fail all the time. You score a hundred every now and again but you get out between nought and 20 far more often. If you get 50, you feel bad because you should have got a hundred. Even if you get a hundred, you feel you should have got 150. So you're always failing.

I wanted to prove myself on the pitch, but I didn't have many chances, so it put a lot more pressure on every single game that I played. I found myself in situations where I was so keen to show my qualities, but many times it worked against me and I was punished for being too eager.

Sometimes you don't play well or you don't score, and in those times, the pressure comes from all around you as well as from yourself.

Things don't always work out as you want them to.

When you don't make the plays that you know you're capable of making, it's frustrating.

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

I always feel as if I'm a disappointment: that people want a grand dame in furs like Barbara Taylor Bradford.

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.

Words can't describe how one would feel in that moment after doing a test for something you really want but in your heart you don't think you have a chance of getting.

We should have won this one. I think it is a lost opportunity.

I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so - which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.

Boy, there are days where I get up and say 'Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this.'

I thought that when you have more success that you'd feel more buoyed or feel more confident. But in fact my brain has the gift of switching it around and saying, 'Now people are expecting something. Now you're really going to let people down.'

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.

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.