Success Quote by Jim McKay

The charm of McKay's line is how it refuses the holy myth of purity without fully betraying it. He starts with the artist's alibi: the work is about craft, about storytelling, about the private discipline of getting better. That's the self-conception creators like to claim because it sounds noble and uncorrupted. Then he swerves into the confession: "there's no doubt about it" you want an audience. Not a tasteful audience, not the right audience, but "lots" of people.

McKay, a journalist who spent his life translating spectacle into narrative, is essentially arguing that ambition isn't a moral failing; it's part of the job. The subtext is aimed at the coyness that surrounds success in American culture: we celebrate the blockbuster and the bestseller, but we distrust the person who openly wants them. His syntax performs the tension in real time. The sentence meanders, doubles back, qualifies itself, then lands on a blunt truth. That's not sloppy; it's honest. It's the sound of someone trying to say the thing you're not supposed to say.

Context matters: McKay came up in an era when mass media meant three networks, a shared national conversation, and the weird intimacy of knowing millions were watching the same moment. In that world, reach wasn't just ego. It was impact. The line is a quiet defense of popularity as a legitimate artistic metric, not the only one, but the one creators pretend not to crave while checking the numbers anyway.