Without question, I've either got to be a writer, or I fail.
It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion.
Since I started acting, I've always been aware of the sort of 'beastly entity' that is America and Hollywood, and semi-consciously, I devised a kind of route in - I'd seen a lot of people try and fail.
I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.
Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those.
The young men in the inner city are without guidance, robbing and shooting each other with no remorse... Our system is crazy because we're planning to fail. Everybody needs something to grasp on to.
I do think there are more and more entrepreneurs all the time that think big. Those are the people we should be finding and funding. Most of them will fail, but the ones who succeed will change the world, and that is progress.
To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.
Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.
I failed world geography, civics, Spanish and English. And when you fail Spanish and English, they do not consider you bilingual. They may call you bi-ignorant because you can't speak any language.
Sochi started with the same problem as every Winter Olympics. Forget the crass commercialism, the fake amateurism, NBC's refusal to televise important events live to all its viewers. As an event, the Winter Games fail on the most basic level. They're lousy to watch.
Farmers the world over, in dealing with costs, returns and risks, are calculating economic agents. Within their small, individual, allocative domain, they are fine-tuning entrepreneurs, tuning so subtly that many experts fail to recognize how efficient they are.
I'm coaching 'swing at this, don't swing at that,' and in the middle of it, a kid looks at me and says, 'Coach, I think I'm going to fail history.' Or maybe their girlfriend just dumped them. These are kids, and once I embraced that, this became a lot more fun.
The more you do stuff, the better you get at dealing with how you still fail at it a lot of the time.
Nobody can fail to lose weight in the jungle, unless they've got a secret stash of pork pies somewhere.
Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.
I think that we're all, as human beings, so limited. If we want to write about ourselves, that's fairly easy. And if we write about our friends or our families, we can do that. But if we want to project ourselves somewhere beyond our personal experience, we're going to fail unless we get that experience or we borrow it from others.
Heroes in drama are people who try hard to reach a virtuous ideal. And whether they succeed or fail really doesn't matter - it's the trying that counts.
We talk about institutions that are too big to fail - I think the story is as much about people who think they are too big to fail.
Anytime we step out boldly to make changes, we take a chance that we might fail. But the only way to get better is to try.
You shouldn't be trying to create a system where no bank fails, but you should be creating one that catches a bank and allows it to fail without impacting the financial markets.
A lot of people will look at you and will fail to see your beauty because you're covered up and they're not used to it. So growing up, I just had to work on my people skills and give people a chance to really know me besides the clothing.
Part of the power of all storytelling is reassurance, offering hope to those sat in the darkness, that good can succeed and wrongdoing fail.
Never be afraid to fail. Failure is only a stepping stone to improvement. Never be overconfident because that will block your improvement.
I'm not saying that hip-hop needs gay rappers or anything, but they need to stop being so close-minded because that will just cause the genre to fail. Look at pop. Pop doesn't discriminate against people. Look at Lady Gaga, y'know what I mean?
I think that if my kids are completely convinced of God's unfailing love for them, whether they fail or not, they'll have confidence to persevere in life.
I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.
Challenges of historic import threaten America's future. Action on the deficit, economy, energy, health care and much more is imperative, yet our legislative institutions fail to act. Congress must be reformed.
If you fail to prepare, you're prepared to fail.
I do get scared, but I think - like it says in another book I've read - feel the fear and do it anyway. I try to have courage, pray a little bit and work through it. I'd rather try, even if I fail.
A poor logo doesn't mean a business will fail, and a good logo doesn't mean it will succeed - it just helps. Ultimately a good logo is something that people recognize instantly and relate to.
When we have fallen and need to get back up again, we are able to do it in His strength walking in His Spirit. Cling to the Spirit of Christ Jesus - He will never fail.
It's okay to fail 'cause there's no failure, you're just informing the richness of your experience, and that's - that's the greatest gift you can possibly give yourself.
When I first thought about leaving the traditional route of a 9-to-5 career to pursue full-time YouTube, it was terrifying - not many people were doing it. The thought was I have to have money saved up, because this very likely might fail. From the start, I had to give it my all for it to work.
As investors, we want to believe we are smart, insightful and uniquely talented - even though we often fail to do the heavy lifting, put in the long hours, and make the uncomfortable but necessary decisions to achieve success.
Is the button white or orange or green or yellow? Does it say 'sell', or 'sell now', or 'on sale' or 'for sale'? You test, you test, you test and most of the ideas you try fail and so I would argue I failed my way to success.
