Art & Creativity Quote by William Peter Blatty

There is a special cruelty in being so successful it deletes your other selves. Blatty’s line is funny in the way a confession can be funny: the laugh comes edged with grievance. He isn’t merely lamenting a stalled comedy career; he’s diagnosing the cultural machine that turns an artist into a single, profitable headline. The Exorcist didn’t just beat his earlier work in the marketplace, it rewrote his identity in public memory, as if the audience can only hold one genre per person and chooses the one that scares them most.

The wording does the work. “Sad truth” frames the complaint as an inevitability, not a tantrum. “Nobody wants me” shifts blame outward but also admits a dependency: writers may posture as solitary geniuses, yet they still crave permission to be seen in full. Then he lands the exaggerated punch: the film “expunged all memory” of comedy. It’s overstatement, but purposeful overstatement, the exact tool of a humorist whose humor has been denied. The subtext is, I can still write jokes; you just won’t let them count.

Context matters: The Exorcist became an era-defining phenomenon, a moral panic and a pop-cultural landmark that fused prestige with box-office hysteria. In that shadow, comedy looks like a side hustle. Blatty is pointing at how fame narrows rather than enlarges, and how the industry rewards a brand more than a body of work. The joke is that even his complaint is comedic; the tragedy is that it has to be.