Over the next four years we will be bold. We will be willing to experiment. We will not fear failure.

And I went to New York and died for 10 years I walked those pavements. I can't think of New York without feeling uncomfortable and feeling like a failure.

We can't have a failure in Iraq but we also can't be there for the next 10 years because if we are it's going to become I think a failure in and of itself.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

I don't know many people if any who have had some straight line toward success. I mean they start here they work hard they've got what it takes and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.

My failure during the first five or six years of my art training to get set in the right direction and the disappointment which it caused me drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure you've been deprived.

My only failure was the restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I kept it open for four years. It was in a tourist town it was only busy four and half five months of the year. But the bills kept coming all year.

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.

A minute's success pays the failure of years.

For me it is just the total experience - from the time I first started as an assistant coach until I wound up at the University of Texas for 20 years.

When he brought it to me four years ago Rodney King had just arrived I was involved in the clean-up of L.A. and I guess it was part of my experience.

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all.

You can't dodge them all. I got hammered plenty of times through the years. But you just get up and keep playing. I can tell you from experience though. Sometimes it hurts like hell.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela where I couldn't find a place for myself for years and years.

When I was 27 years old I organized legal aid clinics to help low-income seniors. It was a life-altering experience.

I started off on stage because it was the only work I could get. I haven't been back for 11 years. I think any stage experience is good experience as far as being an actor is concerned.

Through the years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot but it can't access the hidden places.

So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see - you know if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one which it wasn't in - 21 years ago then I'd think well you know maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on.

When I was 12 years old someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience because words make experience last.