Illusion of Success Quotes

That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

There's a funny thing about fame. The truth is you run as fast as you can towards it because it's everything you want. Not just the fame but what it represents, meaning work, meaning opportunity. And then you get there, and it's shocking how immediately you become enveloped in this world that is incredibly restricting.

If you wanna be famous, then it's okay if the music is fake, because fame isn't real.

I believe that God felt sorry for actors so he created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent.

I think many people have an illusion of success based on entering in at a level that's higher than their experiences.

The illusion when things are going your way is that it's gonna just keep going. But it never does.

Debt gives you the ability to look like you’re winning when you’re not.

The mental game of business is understanding this Paradox: the better you think you are doing, the greater should be your cause for concern: the more self-satisfied you are with your accomplishments, your past achievements, your 'right moves', the less you should be.

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

What is a movie star? It is an illusion. It was everything I ever wanted to be, but it became a kind of shell, non? It was what made me famous and got me women. But it wasn't real.

California is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.

All this is a dream to me. Everything, the applause, the fans asking for autographs, the trips, all that is a dream.

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

The mere suggestion of fame and fortune casts a glamour all its own. It is rather alarming how quickly people will turn someone else's fiction into fact in order to support their own fictions of themselves.

For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome

Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

But glittering prizes and endless compromises, Shatter the illusion of integrity...

I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, "Oh ...".

You finish a movie and you think, there, you've done it, really well, or best you can. But if you watch it, you see it was just bollocks.

Things kind of have their arc: you get signed, and your first thought is, 'Oh my God, I made it!' But you never really make it.

I'm in this business to make films, not get deluded by the system. The system is set up to give you a headache.

I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.

You can sink so fast that you think you are flying.

Before you're famous it's stuff that seems like it'd be really cool, but once you get it, you realize it's not bad, but it's kind of hollow and meaningless.