Quotes About Failure

I went to a wrestling school in Canada. That did not work out well, I think I was out there for like a week.

By the time my attempt to acquire WCW fell apart and Time Warner decided they didn't want anything remotely associated with wrestling near their networks, once that happened and really cut the cord, it was in my rear view mirror and didn't care or think about it too much.

The reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.

All of those years, I felt like 'Heaven's Gate' was a beautiful, fantastically colored balloon tied to a string fastened to my wrist, so the balloon could never fly.

You write a hit the same way you write a flop.

Forget being 'discovered.' All you can do is write. If you write well enough, and are stubborn enough to embrace failure, and if you happen to fall into the narrow categories that the book market recognizes, then you might make a little money. Otherwise, it's a struggle. A gorgeous struggle.

All work is a process of failure. Every single thing I write, I look at it and go, 'Do better. That's not good enough. Do better.' And so, that keeps me up at night.

But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.

I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer.

Game Over is a very frustrating game convention. In short, it means, 'If you were not good enough or did not play the game the way the designer intended you to play, you should play again until you do it right.' What kind of story could a writer tell where the characters could play the same scene ten times until the outcome is right?

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

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.

If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

I realized that for my own part, I was much more likely to take risks, reach out to others, and expose myself to rejection and failure when I felt happy. When I felt unhappy, I felt defensive, touchy, and self-conscious.

Instead of always worrying about being efficient, I wanted to spend time on exploration, experimentation, digression, and failed attempts that didn't always look productive.

Although some people assume that strong feelings of guilt or shame act as safeguards to help people stick to good habits, the opposite is true. People who feel less guilt and who show compassion toward themselves in the face of failure are better able to regain self-control, while people who feel deeply guilty and full of self-blame struggle more.

It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

The Strategy of Safeguards requires us to take a very realistic—perhaps even fatalistic—look at ourselves. But while acknowledging the likelihood of temptation and failure may seem like a defeatist approach, it helps us identify, avoid, and surmount our likely stumbling blocks.

People who feel less guilt and who show compassion toward themselves in the face of failure are better able to regain self-control, while people who feel deeply guilty and full of self-blame struggle more.

Fake Self-Actualization Loophole: Often, a loophole is disguised as an embrace of life or an acceptance of self, so that the failure to pursue a habit seems life-affirming—almost spiritual.

If you're doing something that you don't enjoy and you don't have the gratification of success, failure is particularly painful. But doing what you love is itself the reward.

They had both failed, one to realize his dreams of love, the other to fulfill his dreams of power. What was the reason? "Perhaps it's because we didn't steer a straight course," said Frédéric. "That may be true in your case. I, on the other hand, was far too rigid in my line of conduct...I was too logical, and you were too sentimental." Then they blamed chance, circumstances, the times into which they were born.

I'm the sort of man who's doomed to be a failure and I'll go to my grave without ever knowing whether I was real gold or just tinsel!