Success Quote by Countee Cullen

Cullen refuses the comforting lie that success is either pure meritocracy or pure magic. He splits the difference with a poet's cool-eyed pragmatism: hard work is necessary, but it is not sovereign. The phrase "something indefinable" is doing heavy lifting. By naming luck as "the breaks" and then immediately admitting it can't be fully described or controlled, he punctures the self-help fantasy that craft alone guarantees arrival. For a writer, that honesty is bracing: talent can be real and still be stranded.

The triad "read and write - and wait" lands with a blunt, almost comic austerity. Two verbs, then a pause into time. Cullen is prescribing discipline without promising payoff, which is why the line stings. Waiting here is not passivity; it's endurance in a system that grants access unevenly and unpredictably. It's also a subtle rebuke to impatience and to the market's demand for instant visibility. You can build your instrument daily, but you cannot schedule the moment a gate swings open.

Context sharpens the edge. Cullen, a major voice of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote inside institutions that were fascinated by Black artistry and quick to box it in. "The breaks" can mean publication, patronage, and timing, but also the arbitrary permissions of an industry shaped by race, taste, and trend. The intent isn't to romanticize suffering; it's to tell the truth about a career built at the intersection of labor and contingency, where persistence is the only agency left when the world controls the rest.