Quotes About Risk-taking

I was only 21 when I bought a five-bedroom detached house in Stoke-on-Trent that was way outside of my financial status in life. I did it by borrowing money from my family and the bank, taking out a huge mortgage.

There's this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place, and I was able to rise above that box. I could have done a bunch of movies where I stayed as the Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond persona. But I didn't want to be doing the same thing all the time. Every now and then, you crash and burn, but that's part of it.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

There really is only one story that you need to tell as a scientist or a technologist. It's Prometheus stealing fire. That's it. That's what we do as scientists or technologists.

I want to do everything I can possibly do to step outside the box.

I knew a gentleman who was 65 who had a consulting firm outside of Kansas City, Mo. I convinced him to sell me the business, which did auditing and reviewing of freight bill charges, for nothing down. It was a step out of working in this bureaucratic setting of corporate America and going out on my own in 1984.

You can't just keep recycling revivals. And you can't keep betting on the efforts of guys like me who've been around. You have to take the next step and bet on the next generation.

I'm putting everything on the line in being able to express myself in a different way than rappers normally do. They might say, 'It's rap' or 'It's R&B,' but I'm stepping outside the box and making music for me and making music for the fans to understand me. I'm going the extra distance to be able to come across different.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of crackpot than the stigma of conformity.

I am somebody who... - I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I need that freedom, that ability to make mistakes out there. Because there's a fine line between making a mistake or being brilliant.

But I usually read non-fiction; I love Richard Branson books.

If you want to be in the world I live in, which is a creative world with new ideas, then you've got to get away from the norm. You've got to go for it.

Not many directors have the courage to make movies that are against conventional, commercial norms.

Sometimes, not knowing what you're doing allows you to do things you never knew you could do.

Don't be afraid to try new things, because I just tried shot put not knowing my family history behind it, and trying it led me to the rest of my life.

You can't have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take risks. It's better to do something that's not perfect and successful every time. It's important to be fearless and move forward, to learn from what went wrong.

I've noticed that the more adventurous and in that mode that I am, it seems that the more the audience really likes it.

One thing I've learned from my parents and from observing all the artists I've been lucky enough to grow up around is that you've got to be brave.

We are held back by too much caution. We are timid about venturing. We are not bold enough. And so we die before we reach middle age, although we will not be lowered into the ground until we pass three score and ten.

One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there's nothing for it but to fail faster and better.

There was a whole subculture of mentalists who spent their nights breaking into boarded-up tube stations, forgotten sewers, abandoned buildings, and other places you just aren't meant to be.

We spent the time running free and unsupervised all over the island, and going out in boats on our own. For this was the 1970s, when the notion of childcare was to open the front door and say: 'Bye kids, come back when your hungry. Don't fall off a cliff...' -From The Writer's Map chapter First Steps

Long have you timidly waded Holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, Rise again, nod to me, shout, And laughingly dash with your hair.