Daily Inspiration Quote by Sidney Sheldon

Six years is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. Sheldon isn’t romanticizing the hustle; he’s auditing it. By pairing “worked in Hollywood as a reader” with “a would-be writer,” he frames apprenticeship not as a glamorous prelude but as a prolonged limbo where your proximity to the machine doesn’t equal entry into it. A reader is the industry’s intake valve, the person who consumes other people’s dreams at scale. The subtext: he learned craft and market logic by watching scripts live or die in coverage, long before he got the validation of a sale. That’s not an anecdote; it’s a credential.

The phrase “would-be writer” is doing self-deprecating, defensive work too. It acknowledges the stigma of aspiration in an industry that treats ambition as abundant and talent as scarce. Calling himself “would-be” inoculates against the easy myth that success is destiny. It also signals an insider’s understanding of Hollywood’s hierarchy: plenty of people write, very few get paid to write, and the difference is often timing, taste, and tenacity rather than pure genius.

Context matters: Sheldon came up through entertainment’s industrial era, when studios, networks, and publishers were gatekept by layers of assistants, readers, editors. His line is an anti-breakthrough narrative. It reframes “selling the first story” as an outcome of endurance and pattern recognition, not inspiration. The intent is quietly instructive: if you want to be a professional storyteller, you may have to survive being a professional evaluator first.