Two great paragraphs from a very good book

A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby.

The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something. We have to be something. It's our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can't I? Where's mine, huh? OK, so my band, we put on the best live shows you could ever see in a bar, and we made two albums, which a lot of critics and not many real people liked. But having talent is never enough to make us happy, is it? I mean, it should be, because a talent is a gift, and you should thank God for it, but I didn't. It just pissed me off because I wasn't being paid for it, and it didn't get me on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Oscar Wilde once said, "One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead." Well fucking right on, Oscar. My real life was full of headlining shows at Wembley and Madison Square Garden and platinum records, and Grammys, and that wasn't the life I was leading, which is maybe why it felt like I could throw it away. The life I was leading didn't let me be, I don't know...be who I thought I was. It didn't even let me stand up properly. It felt like I'd been walking down a tunnel that was getting narrower and narrower, and darker and darker, and had started shipping water, and I was all hunched up, and there was a wall of rock in front of me and the only tools I had to use were my fingernails.