Success Quote by Jerome Lawrence

The line reads like a quiet rebuke to the zero-sum instincts of the arts business, where scarcity gets treated as a law of nature. Lawrence, a playwright who knew how quickly taste, funding, and gatekeepers can turn, is pushing back against the temptation to root for someone else’s flop as a shortcut to your own relevance. The intent is plainly ethical, but the craft is strategic: he frames generosity not as sainthood, but as self-interest. “The more good things… the better it is for all of us” is an argument from ecosystem, not purity.

The subtext is a diagnosis of professional insecurity. When artists “demand the failure of your peers,” they’re really demanding reassurance: that the room is small enough to contain only them. Lawrence refuses that logic and replaces it with a thicker idea of cultural health. Strong work in film, TV, and theater doesn’t steal oxygen; it expands appetite, trains audiences to expect more, and builds the infrastructure that allows riskier work to survive. His list of mediums matters, too: it’s an anti-silo statement from someone writing in a 20th-century landscape where theater was increasingly competing with, and borrowing from, screen culture.

Contextually, Lawrence’s career (including Inherit the Wind, a play about public thought being put on trial) primes him to distrust mob impulses and intellectual bullying. Here, the “mob” is professional jealousy. The wit is in the plainness: he makes collaboration sound like a pragmatic market reality, not a kumbaya slogan.