If you are making money writing, you are doing great. If you can support yourself writing, you are a success. I don't care if you're writing textbooks or Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for weighty publications of world renown: If you're writing and it's paying the bills, consider yourself a successful writer.
By adversity are wrought the greatest works of admiration, and all the fair examples of renown, out of distress and misery are grown.
Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown... There's something so hopelessly gross and vile about him it's hard to take him seriously.
To set the cause above renown.
Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote.
Henry M. Jackson, congressman and senator from 1941 until his death in 1983, achieved far greater renown than most legislators, ran for president in 1972 and 1976, and was for much of the 1970s and 1980s one of the most powerful men in America.
Renown? I've already got more of it than those I respect, and will never have as much as those for whom I feel contempt.