Time & Perspective Quote by William Goldman

Calling yourself a "failed playwright" right after casually dropping "three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30" is pure Goldman: a self-own that doubles as a flex, delivered with the timing of someone who understands show business is mostly controlled humiliation. The line is engineered to puncture the mythology of artistic arrival. Broadway, in the popular imagination, is the summit; Goldman treats it like a trapdoor.

The intent is defensive and disarming. By claiming failure first, he takes the sting out of critics and the industry, reframing flop as biography rather than verdict. It also signals a working writer's pragmatism: the theater is a public referendum with a nightly scoreboard, and he lost. "They all flopped" isn't melodrama; it's the brutal clarity of box office language, the market's most indifferent noun.

"and I fled" does the real work. It turns career recalibration into survival narrative, suggesting not just disappointment but exile: the sense that Broadway doesn't merely reject you, it marks you. In Goldman's context - a writer who later became synonymous with Hollywood screenwriting craft and the famous cynicism of "Nobody knows anything" - this reads like the origin story of his worldview. Failure isn't romanticized; it's instructional. He learns early that prestige is unstable, success is noisy, and the smart move is to pivot before the industry defines you permanently.