Time & Perspective Quote by Al Lewis

The line has the plainspoken grit of someone who spent a lifetime in show business learning that “arrival” is mostly a myth. Al Lewis wasn’t a guru; he was an actor best known for playing Grandpa on The Munsters, a role that could have frozen him into a single pop-culture pose. So when he says the struggle goes on, he’s not romanticizing hardship. He’s naming the long middle stretch of a working life: auditions, typecasting, reinvention, the constant negotiation between wanting recognition and refusing to be defined by it.

“The victory is in the struggle” flips the usual success narrative on its head. It’s not a motivational poster; it’s a defense mechanism sharpened into philosophy. If you locate victory at the finish line, you’re always one rejection away from feeling like a failure. Lewis relocates it to the daily act of persisting, which is both emotionally protective and quietly radical. It suggests control: you can’t command outcomes, but you can choose the terms on which you keep going.

“And I accepted that a long time ago” is the tell. Acceptance here isn’t resignation; it’s maturity, even a kind of freedom. The subtext is: stop waiting for permission, stop bargaining with the future. For an actor from Lewis’s era - when careers rose and fell on gatekeepers, studios, and fickle public taste - that mindset isn’t abstract. It’s survival, reframed as dignity.