Success Quote by E. L. Doctorow

The line has the casual shrug of a confession and the bite of a self-indictment. Doctorow frames failure not as fate but as a quiet, almost polite choice: if you tell yourself you will lose, you get to skip the humiliating labor of hoping. The missing speech is the tell. A speech is what you write for the moment when the world surprises you, when you might have to stand up and accept something you didn’t let yourself want. By not preparing it, the speaker keeps ambition deniable.

Doctorow, a novelist obsessed with the machinery of American myth, knows how people narrate themselves out of responsibility. This is a sentence about storytelling as self-sabotage: a preemptive plot twist that protects the ego. If you lose, you were right. If you win, you can claim authenticity, spontaneity, even modesty. Either way, you avoid confronting the scarier possibility that effort matters, that outcomes are partly earned, and that you might be judged on the seriousness of your desire.

The context matters because Doctorow lived in a culture that romanticizes the underdog and distrusts overt striving. “I didn’t prepare” can read as charming, even virtuous, a way of laundering fear into humility. He punctures that pose by making the logic explicit. The sentence is funny because it’s recognizable; it’s sharp because it’s not flattering. It exposes how we use pessimism as a lifestyle hack: lower expectations, avoid preparation, preserve a clean alibi.