Success Quote by Laurence Housman

Failure is doing double duty here: it’s the bruising obstacle and the unlikely career counselor. Housman frames his early art training not as a romantic apprenticeship but as a prolonged misrouting - “five or six years” long enough to feel like a life sentence when you’re young and ambitious. The key phrase is “get set in the right direction,” which quietly admits how much creative development depends on gatekeepers, instruction, and the often invisible social machinery of art worlds. He isn’t confessing a lack of talent so much as a lack of alignment: the wrong mentors, the wrong methods, the wrong aesthetic fashion.

Then comes the emotional engine: “the disappointment which it caused me.” Disappointment is softer than devastation, but more corrosive because it’s sustained. It’s the feeling of being almost-formed and repeatedly told you don’t fit. That’s why the pivot to writing isn’t presented as a dreamy second passion; it’s an “alternative,” a pragmatic reroute that still preserves the self-image of an artist. Writing becomes the medium where persistence can outrun institutional misdirection: you can draft, revise, publish, stage - and do it with fewer permissions than painting demands.

As a playwright in a period when British cultural taste was both fiercely policed and rapidly shifting, Housman’s line reads like a case study in how creative identities are forged by rejection. The subtext is defiant: if the system can’t “set” him, he’ll set himself, converting disappointment into a more portable, more public art form.