Success Quote by Hugh Laurie

Laurie’s line has the sly snap of a comedian who’s discovered that winning can be its own trap. “Hostage to fortune” is an old, grand phrase - almost Shakespearean - and he wields it like a prop: dramatic enough to be funny, precise enough to sting. The subtext is career vertigo. Success doesn’t just validate you; it annexes you. A breakout role (read: House, with its global ubiquity) becomes a kind of benevolent captor, narrowing the public’s imagination of who you are and what you’re allowed to do next.

The sentence rhythm does most of the work. He undercuts himself in real time: “Not that I am complaining” defuses any whiff of celebrity ingratitude, while still letting him confess the claustrophobia. “I wanted to play the role” asserts agency, then immediately yields to contingency: “I didn’t think the show would be such a success. OK, I thought it would fail.” That “OK” is the comic pivot - the moment he stops polishing the story and admits the cruder truth. It’s also protective: self-deprecation as inoculation against the charge that he’s rewriting history to sound prophetic.

The sharpest insight is his distinction between quality and outcome. “Not because it was bad… plenty of good things… wither on the vine” names the secret humiliation of entertainment: merit is only one ingredient, and often not the decisive one. Laurie is translating an industry reality into a personal paradox: you can make something good, expect it to disappear anyway, and then spend years living inside its unexpected permanence.