Life & Wisdom Quote by Budd Schulberg

Schulberg’s line lands like a warning disguised as career advice: in the culture business, “system” isn’t just a set of rules, it’s an ecosystem that decides what gets oxygen. The phrasing is brutally binary - “either” you conform “or” you suffer - because he’s describing a marketplace that punishes ambiguity. There’s no romantic third path here, no gentle compromise between integrity and success. The payoff is the chilling little bureaucratic phrase “expected to be a hit,” which frames art as pre-approved product. A “hit” isn’t something audiences discover; it’s something institutions predict, budget, package, and then require reality to validate.

The subtext reads like a writer who’s watched talent turned into labor, and ambition turned into compliance. Schulberg knew Hollywood from the inside and wrote about its moral compromises (What Makes Sammy Run?; On the Waterfront). So “very tough going” carries more than financial struggle; it’s social and professional exile: fewer meetings, fewer champions, fewer chances. The system doesn’t have to censor you outright. It can simply not return your calls.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to flatter the outsider myth. Schulberg isn’t selling rebellion as brand identity; he’s naming the hidden toll of not cooperating with the machinery of taste. In a media world built on risk management - then studio notes, now algorithms and trend cycles - the line still stings because it describes how power maintains itself: not by banning the daring, but by making it exhausting to persist.