Quotes About Success

Life is about balance. You don't want to live out of whack over here or out of whack over here. I want to win and be well compensated, and I think there's a balance to find. It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.

For every whack I've given, I've gotten four or five.

Thanks to a lot of people, not just myself, 'Whale Rider' had an amazing impact emotionally, and people remember it. I count myself very lucky that all those doors were unlocked, I just had to open them.

I bought a midnight blue Porsch with a whale tail when I was winning big one time in L.A. That car was fast, fast, fast!

You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors... What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you'd come to closed door number eight and you'd think, 'Great, I got another one out of the way'... Keep moving forward.

As for 'Twin Peaks,' I'm happy to have been a part of something that was a success. The only time I was concerned was during the second season when it started to lose its focus, and I was thinking, 'What if I get stuck here for five years? I would go crazy.'

What if Whitney was at her top, and we brought in a name like Whitney Houston, it would sell.

Authors should do multiple submissions to agents. I mean, that's the way the business world works and whether or not the industry likes it or not, they can't stop you from submitting to multiple agents and you know what? If an agent misses out on you because they took too long with your query letter, tough luck for them.

It's been great that every title that we've done internally has been a huge success, but when you've got 50 or 100 people on there, all their families and everyone counting on you there, the idea of 'What if you screw up once?' or 'What if the market changes?'

So what if I am an actor? MGR, Jayalalithaa, Raj Babbar, Sunil Dutt - all made successful politicians.

It's seen as dirty to be ambitious. What if U2 weren't ambitious? We wouldn't have that gift we have from them.

My brother's an aerospace engineer who works for Boeing, and I started thinking, 'Well, my brother works nine hours a day at his job... What if I worked nine hours a day at being an actor?'

I'm not good at Disney acting. I'm really not. I never was on that audition list, which I don't mind. I don't know. I look back, and I'm kind of wiping my forehead at the thought of, 'What if I had gone that route?'

What if the slowdown in merger activity isn't cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done?

It's gone on my whole life, this David and Goliath syndrome that a lot of these smaller guys always have. They think the only reason I've ever had any success in my career is because of my physical size. And you know what? If that's the case, so be it. I really don't care. Because I have that size.

I'm one of those lucky guys making a living out of something I really enjoy doing. That's a blessing. But you never know. What if my subsequent book series flops? I don't come from a wealthy background, so I'd be left with no choice. I'd have to go back into banking!

Being a popular director or actor's son can be frightening in this industry. What if you are not able to make it?

What if you didn't have education for sports? People with a natural inclination for sports, athletes without any kind of education, without any kind of training, they would just be couch athletes instead of the world class Olympians that we have.

You go to the edit room and see one scene which has come out fantastically, and you feel the film will set records. By evening, you look at the budget figures or something that hasn't worked out and ask yourself - what if this doesn't work?

I remember looking to McDonald's, and, my God, they have 13,000 restaurants in the United States. Well, we have almost a couple thousand Chipotles. What if Pizzeria Locale is a few thousand, and Shod. All of a sudden, we're bigger than McDonald's in the U.S. I mean, that's not an unreasonable way to think about this.

It was a shock to everyone when I became a rapper. Huge shock to everyone. But I knew it all along. I just didn't want to tell anybody cause then it's like, What if it doesn't work?

I don't like to lose, no matter what I am playing. Football, tennis, head tennis, no matter what. If I am playing something, I am playing to win.

One day I heard Ray Charles on the radio and I found out he was blind. I thought, 'You know what, if there's room for Ray, there might be room for Jose.'

So what if you have two points? As long as we win, what does it matter? What if you don't have no points?