Love Quote by Garson Kanin

Kanin’s line is a Broadway-native correction to a culture that fetishizes the curtain call. As a playwright who lived inside rehearsals, rewrites, and the long slog between opening nights, he’s not denying ambition; he’s demoting it. “Believe me, I love to succeed” is a crafty aside, the kind you toss off to disarm the listener who thinks you’re about to preach some ascetic anti-ego sermon. He admits the appetite first, then pivots: the real charge isn’t the trophy, it’s the process.

The subtext is almost managerial in its honesty: applause is a spike, work is a life. Success is episodic and externally granted; “the doing” is continuous and internally governed. Kanin’s phrase “spiritual and emotional excitement” is doing double duty. He’s reclaiming language usually reserved for romance or religion and attaching it to craft, as if to say: if you’re waiting for meaning to arrive in the form of a review, a box office number, a prize, you’re outsourcing your inner life.

Context matters. Kanin worked across theatre and film, arenas where the public only sees the polished artifact and where “success” can feel like a weather system you can’t control. His intent reads like advice to the anxious striver: build a relationship with the work itself, because that’s the one part you actually get to live in. The line lands because it isn’t anti-success; it’s anti-dependency.