The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile. I think of my strawberry souffle. I did that at least twenty-eight times before I finally conquered it.
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award
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I’d like to write something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers would find a source of respect. I think I’d rather win, for example, a Writers Guild award than almost anything on earth. And the few nominations I’ve had with the guild, and the few awards I’ve had, represented to me a far more legitimate concrete achievement than anything. Emmys, for example, most of that’s bullshit. Oscars are even worse. We have a strange, terrible affliction in this town. Everybody walks around bent-backed from slapping each other on the backs so much. It looks like arthritis but it isn’t. It’s hunger for recognition. And it’s sort of like, well, I’ll scratch you this time if you’ll scratch me next time. That kind of thing.
Rod Serling (1924-1975) American screenwriter, playwright, television producer, narrator
“Rod Serling: The Facts of Life,” interview by Linda Brevelle (4 Mar 1975)
(Source)
You’re only as good as your last story.
Helen Thomas (1920-2013) American reporter and author
Acceptance speech, Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award, White House Correspondents Dinner, Washington, DC (25 Apr 1998)
That was the full speech.
Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself, been somewhat warmly denounced — there was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail. And, much harder to endure than any raging condemnation, a certain number of old acquaintances among journalists, what in the galloping American slang we call the “I Knew Him When Club,” have scribbled that since they know me personally, therefore I must be a rather low sort of fellow and certainly no writer. But if I have now and then received such cheering brickbats, still I, who have heaved a good many bricks myself, would be fatuous not to expect a fair number in return.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) American novelist, playwright
Nobel Lecture (12 Dec 1930)
