Life & Wisdom Quote by Joe Eszterhas

There’s a little trapdoor in “I always wanted to be a rock’n’roll star”: it pretends to be innocent nostalgia, then quietly reframes a whole career as performance. Coming from Joe Eszterhas - the screenwriter who turned Hollywood excess into both subject matter and personal brand - it reads less like a childhood dream than a mission statement. He’s not talking about guitars; he’s talking about permission. Rock stardom is shorthand for swagger, volume, transgression, and the intoxicating idea that the rules are for other people.

The line’s power is how it smuggles desire into identity. “Always” isn’t factual so much as mythmaking: a way to tell your own story as destiny, not opportunism. That’s especially pointed for a writer, a profession stereotyped as invisible labor. Eszterhas made himself visible - tabloid-famous, famously paid, famously abrasive. Wanting to be a rock star is a bid to escape the writer’s traditional posture of observation and claim the frontman’s role: the guy who gets booed, adored, blamed, paid.

It also carries a sharp, defensive subtext: if you accuse him of being loud, mercenary, or vulgar, he’s already agreed with you and called it style. In the late-20th-century culture he helped feed - where celebrity outran craft and the behind-the-scenes became the main stage - this isn’t a confession of immaturity. It’s an explanation of strategy.