John Shirley Quotes

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I had amazing stuff happen right off the top. I thought this was how it worked. Hollywood is awesome! Cut to three years later: What happened?

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations.

California is a tragic country … like every Promised Land.

If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven.

God, how that stings! I've spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that's just science fiction.

Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.

It just wasn't the fairy tale I had hoped for.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

It's always bitterly disappointing to people to see how normally one can live.

At 30 I thought my life was over. I thought I'd have made something of myself by then, that life would somehow have made the necessary arrangements - but actually I had nothing.

One naively thinks that by winning the Olympics, it's going to be this switch, and then your life is going to be perfect, and that's not reality.

If you're alive for more than five minutes, you're going to be disappointed.

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?

Nothing seems to come up to your expectations. But nothing I had heard about Hollywood was enough.

I hate it when there's a good movie, someone overhypes it and I'm disappointed that I don't like it more.

Enthusiasm just creates bubbles; it doesn't keep them from popping.

Holidays in general breed unrealistic expectations. The minute you start wondering, 'is it going to be wonderful enough?,' it never will be.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.

My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.

It was taunted as reality. It was dangled as a carrot. In terms of people's hopes and dreams, to say that that is less of a reality than the daily grind they find themselves in is maybe not correct.

I'm not always going to keep waiting for a fairytale ending.

I am disappointed when I don't win, because I want to believe I can win on every horse I ride, which is a ridiculous thing to think. Even if I'm on a horse that I have woken up thinking has no chance, by the time I've reached the course, I'll have convinced myself that it can win and will be disappointed if it doesn't.

I have had four happy days in my life, and three of them turned out to be illusions.