Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

As might be supposed my parents were quite poor but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life as indeed over anything.

Sadness is a super important thing not to be ashamed about but to include in our lives. One of the bigger problems with sadness or depression is there's so much shame around it. If you have it you're a failure. You are felt as being very unattractive.

Ambitious failure magnificent failure is a very good thing.

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for after all habit is relative to a stereotyped world and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons things situations seem alike.

Failure is the most terrible thing in our business. When we fail the whole world knows about it.

I'm not scared of anything in particular but I am motivated by a fear of failure as opposed to a need to succeed.

I don't want to feel like a failure to my daughter. She's the best thing I've ever done. Buffy - pretty great and all but Charlotte's way better.

Attempt something so impossible that unless God is in it it's doomed to failure.

War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations Clinton's mediation.

I assume everything I do in life is gonna be a failure and then if it turns up roses then I'm psyched.

There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero where there's no expectations and that's where I like to be.

America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone's going from nothing to something. Why? In theory if not practice the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism - or at least we used to.

I get asked 'How can you have such failures in your films?' Well what else is life about? There's some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it.

We now live in a world where the only thing to have is success but failure is marvelous. It's fertiliser it's like living fertiliser because you're forced on yourself.

Before I was married I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.

I'm fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule so much so that I've wired myself for failure.

The main reason for the failure of the modern medical science is that it is dealing with results and not causes. Nothing more than the patching up of those attacked and the burying of those who are slain without a thought being given to the real strong hold.

Failure is an enigma. You worry about it and it teaches you something.

The banking collapse was caused more than anything by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation rather than by greed.

Failure doesn't kill you... it increases your desire to make something happen.

It's probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years it's a failure.

I feel in the end as if everything I've done has been a failure.

At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent but I did know I had a fear of failure and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.