Successful Story Quotes & Sayings

First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That's what everyone wants. Not 24-7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche or a blow job or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can't hide. Every single successful love song of the past fifty years can be traced back to 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding. Trust me. I've thought a lot about this.

About "I wanna hold your hand" by The Beatles — David Levithan

West Side Story was a highly popular and successful musical play and now is a similarly well-received motion picture. (I would think that it could also be used shrewdly as a document for discussion in Sunday Schools, in place of some of the ridiculous curriculum materials now in use). — William Stringfellow

I've never cared about how successful or how big I was going to be. I just wanted to be part of a story that affected people, made them laugh or cry. To me, that was more important than having my face on some billboard. — Matt Bomer

To me, one of the greatest triumphs in doing a book is to tell the story as simply as possible. My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful. I write with the premise that less is more. Writing is not difficult to me. I read into a tape recorder, constantly dropping a word here and there from my manuscript until I get a minimum amount of words to say exactly what I want to say. Each time I drop a word or two, it brings me a sense of victory! — Ezra Jack Keats

I always encourage people in the early parts of their career to focus on writing. If you can communicate clearly, if you can articulate a thought, if you can write a great story, then you're going to be successful. — Steve Capus

If the book is finished - published and on the shelf - I do not think of revising it. But if I'm not finished psychologically with characters, they will recur, either as themselves or as new, slightly altered manifestations, and their same issues will reappear. It's a matter of the subject and emotional investment and my own obsessive thinking about various issues It's an unconscious process. To say that a single story is not done isn't quite true. A story can be finished and judged successful or not by somebody else, but if the issue is not done for me, I can count on its reappearance. — Antonya Nelson

Stories that are truly successful are the ones where the protagonist is the bad, dirty one. The human story is a fairly dark one with painful and dangerous impulses that we all have. And that's coupled with a fortress-like psychology that most people have, protecting them from the awareness of the fact that they are part of this human experience — Ryan Blacketter

The idea itself is the ten percent inspiration; the hammering it into a viable, successful, memorable story is the ninety percent perspiration that follows. — Chris Claremont

Books that take us to an exotic place and never let the grit of that place get under our fingernails...are far less successful. One leaves the places of the book and never feels like one's really gotten one's imaginative passport stamped. — Andrew Lazo

Kim Kardashian is a kind of archetype. But she owns her beauty and is tremendously successful. There's no tragedy, there's no drug story. There's just her and her fame and her beauty. But Anna Nicole created that template of somebody that you'd want to watch on reality TV. Somebody that you'd want to invite into your home or as a role model, in terms of beauty and lifestyle and glamour. — Margaret Cho

If you are a "now-person", you reduce the time rate during which your success story is to be published; if you delay a bit, you are either prolonging the date of publishing or you are deleting it at all cost! Be a "now-person" and do it now! — Israelmore Ayivor

I don't really get attached to anything. I'm pretty brutal about cutting stuff. With each successful movie, I've discovered anything that's not connected to the immediate story is going to be cut out of it. — Judd Apatow

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. — J.R.R. Tolkien

The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible. — Beverly Cleary

Let people know that you will always believe in the happy ending to the story
because the story doesn't end here. Some happy endings will never be read in this life. But the atonement of Jesus Christ promises us that our stories will all have successful conclusions one day, if we put our trust in him. — Emily Watts

But although quality, price, and advertising contribute to products and ideas being successful, they don't explain the whole story. — Jonah Berger

If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show. — Dorothy Fields

The mark of a successful author isn't whether he/she becomes rich and famous. Success is a story worthy enough to touch, move, or inspire even one reader in a way that is meaningful to them. — Lianne Miller

Our Pavlovian response to movies has gotten to its lowest point ever. You look at a lot of movies that are successful and a lot of movies that studios hold up as examples and you go, 'My God, that isn't even a story. It isn't even two acts. It's eight set pieces drawn out with slow motion.' The difficulty for me was that you had to hope that people were interested in this kind of a story. — David Fincher

Leaders approach conflict with an eye for resolution. When handled effectively, successful confrontations raise team performance. To manage conflict effectively, you must begin by recognizing there are three sides to every story:
Yours / Theirs / The Truth — Angie Morgan

'Flash Forward' was one of the big heartbreaks of my career. It was just this very frustrating experience. If we'd been allowed to tell the story we wanted to tell, I don't know that it would've been more successful or not. There's no way to know. — David S.Goyer

It's not by story alone that successful advocates urge others to take action. Advocating with our personal stories takes a specific kind of preparation. It requires practice with elements of persuasion, public speaking, media interview skills and storytelling - not to mention healthy does of fortitude and commitment. — John Capecci And Timothy Cage

I think the best advice I ever got about acting was from my dad, which was, 'If they don't buy the fish on the first toss, throw it back in the wagon and go to the second house.' Which is like an old Jewish fishmongers' story about how you become a successful fish monger. — Lin Shaye

So the moral of the story is that the primary ingredient for a successful nation is guns. — Cory O'Brien

A story has come down about Rumi: a woman asks if he would say something to her young boy about his eating too much of a particular kind of white-sugar candy. Rumi tells her to come back in two weeks. She does, and he tells her again to come in two weeks. She does, and he advises the child to cut down on sweets.
"Why did you not say this a month ago?"
"Because I had to see if I could resist having that candy for two weeks. I couldn't. Then I tried again and was successful. Only now can I tell him to try not to have so much. — Coleman Barks

You don't have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he's just this magnificent human being. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy. — Bill Bryson

The secret of a successful newspaper is to take one story each day and bang the hell out of it. Give the public what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not. — Herbert Bayard Swope

I reread the Odyssey at that time, which I had first read in school and remembered as a story of a homecoming.But it is not a story of a homecoming. How could the Greeks who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. — Bernhard Schlink

To hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you'd think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story. — Noah Feldman

I think I've learned that if you want to be successful, you have to tell your story honestly and from your heart - and I think a healthy sense of humor doesn't hurt either. — Dorothea Benton Frank

You are happy and kind; therefore, you are successful. — A.D. Posey

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell. — Mark Twain

You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling. — John Lasseter

Dare not to criticise self, lift yourself up and set the boundaries for your worth. Speak kindly to self and hand your worries over to the wind,if you are here; you are successful already, start believing in your story, the destination will be meaningless if the journeys never been truly lived — Nikki Rowe

The ink in the pen that writes success stories is "FOCUS" ... — Israelmore Ayivor

I don't even know of a room that doesn't have a flat-screen TV in it. These are things that just come in environments these days. And if you were going to walk into a space, where did you come from? Was there a bathroom around the corner? These are things that are authentic, and that's what makes successful television. It's not pre-produced garbage. It's believability and connection. The environment has to tell that story. — James Pearse Connelly

The Paperbats book. Successful publication release with 30 books downloaded in first day and a half.
"This delightful childrens' book has just been published on smashwords, where it can be read for free! I invite you to enjoy a lovely story with yany young children. — Jerry Evans

It's very difficult to have a successful series that can continue to capture and captivate an audience and keep people interested. Because the story, you've got to be able to continue to tell this story. — Jaime Pressly

These fascinating findings make it untenable to claim that personality ratings are irrelevant, or all in the eye of the beholder, or tell you nothing but some kind of story that the participant is spinning about himself. Being alive and having a successful partnership are profoundly important elements, in both experiential and evolutionary terms, of any human life, and so if some pen-and-paper rating scale that takes ten minutes to complete predicts them, however imperfectly, we should sit up and take notice. We should try to understand how it could be that such a scale could have any predictive value given the preposterous and unpredictable complexity of human life. That, of course, is what this book is about. — Daniel Nettle

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law? — Bernhard Schlink

Most of life's issues can simply be answered by posing this one question to yourself " Is it worth it--to me? — Heidi Thompson

I just wrote a really cool script. It's called "One Track Mind." It's an origin story about the most successful and the most foul-mouthed, outrageous songwriter in history. — Catherine Hardwicke

I am hard-pressed to find a successful writer who doesn't have a similar story to mine - transformation through the public library. — Karin Slaughter

Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures. — Margaret Lazarus Dean

Strange medical news from Pakistan: A man had a successful organ transplant with a dog. They gave the man a dog's organ. In a related story today, Keith Richards was seen chasing a mailman. — Craig Kilborn

Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story. — John Dufresne

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists. — Eric Ries

I don't think people really understood what I did. And you know, in my book, 'A Helluva High Note' deals with my back story, that I was a songwriter, that I spent years trying to hone my craft and being rejected and then finally becoming a successful songwriter, record executive and publisher. — Kara DioGuardi

Story-selling is the secret to successful brand selling — Bernard Kelvin Clive

What the young writer needs to develop, to achieve his goal of becoming a great artist, is not a set of aesthetic laws but artistic mastery. He cannot hope to develop mastery all at once; it involves too much. But if he pursues his goal in the proper way, he can approach it much more rapidly than he would if he went at it hit-or-miss, and the more successful he is at each stage along the way, the swifter his progress is likely to be. Invariably when the beginning writer hands in a short story to his writing teacher, the story has many things about it that mark it as amateur. But almost as invariably, when the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional. Having written some small thing very well, he begins to learn confidence. — John Gardner

So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way - not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.
This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Here's another analogy. Human beings bring only a handful of facial features to the blueprint of how we look - two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, a mouth, a pair of cheekbones, and two ears, all pasted onto a somewhat ovular-to-round face. That particular blueprint doesn't often vary much, either. Interestingly enough, this is about the same number of essential storytelling parts and milestones that each and every story needs to showcase in order to be successful. Now, consider this: With only these eleven variables to work with, ask yourself how often you see two people who look exactly alike. In a crowd of ten thousand faces, you would be able to differentiate each and every one of them, other than a set of twins or two in attendance. Where we humans are concerned, the miracle of originality resides in the Creator, who applies an engineering-driven process - eleven variables - to an artistic outcome. Where art is concerned, there is something to be learned from that. — Larry Brooks

It was one of those perfect nights, listening to the waves crash, feeling the warm summer breeze, watching the sun set over the ocean as the moon rose up in the sky. I looked out over the cliffs and I thought about the explorers who had sailed from places like this, what they'd accomplished, mapping the unknown world, charting our place in the universe. How many times had they failed and fallen down only to get back up and try again? How many times had they sailed out on an impossible voyage and made a successful return home? I sat there with Carola looking out over the endless horizon. It was strange, but I felt like everything was going to be okay. The end of my story was not yet written, and I still had the chance to make it extraordinary. — Mike Massimino

For those of us at Marvel Television, it always begins with the story. It's all about the script. It's making sure it's there, on the page. So, we needed to go to a group of individuals who have not only created some of the most memorable animated characters, like Ben 10 and Generator Rex, but also had done two seasons of our very successful Marvel's Ultimate Spider-Man series, and that's the Man of Action guys. But, it wasn't just that. — Jeph Loeb

The truth for a novelist isn;t the same as the facts . . . When a writer is successful in using a story taken from experience, it is not told exactly the way it happened, but in the way that reveals, through all one's beliefs, hopes, and fear, how the event should have happened. — Craig Nova

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a form of service journalism. To be successful, I think it has to be a combination of a good story, it has to be funny, and it also needs to be packed with useful information. — Ted Allen

Anytime I fall in love, I feel it's a first time. I have had no successful love story yet. I hope I will succeed next time when I fall in love. — Sonam Kapoor

There is a myth that the purpose of education is to give one the means for upward mobility and success. The plain truth is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does need desperately more peacemakers, healers, restorers, story tellers, and lovers of every shape and form. — David W. Orr

If you start to see more successful businesses that are playing on a global level, the story of Africa will begin to change — Tara Fela-Durotoye

The Whig interpretation of history ... is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present. — Herbert Butterfield

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda's, "My creatures are born of a long denial," seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge ... It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it. — Julio Cortazar

All of women's stories in the 19th century had either one of two endings: you either had the good Jane Austen marriage at the end and you were happy; or you had the terrible Henry James savage downfall because of your own hubris as a woman, or you've made some great error leading you down a path to ruin. One is the story of love that's successful and the other is the story usually of reckless love that goes terribly wrong that destroys the woman. — Elizabeth Gilbert

If I'm successful in fooling a wire service, I don't really have to do anything else to promote the story. — Joey Skaggs

A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating. — Bill Johnson

A successful direct action is like creating a good fantasy story. It's like a quest," Phillips said excitedly in the introduction. "There is a conflict, compelling characters, a good plan, build up, twists and turns, adversity, the climax, and then the win — Anonymous

My last point about getting started as a writer: do something first, good or bad, successful or not, and write it up before approaching an editor. The best introduction to an editor is your own written work, published or not. I traveled across Siberia on my own money before ever approaching an editor; I wrote my first book, Siberian Dawn, without knowing a single editor, with no idea of how to get it published. I had to risk my life on the Congo before selling my first magazine story. If the rebel spirit dwells within you, you won't wait for an invitation, you'll invade and take no hostages. — Jeffery Taylor

I'm going to be super successful one day, and I'm going to write a book. It's going to be a kickass autobiography. And this is how it always happens in the book. This is just that part of the book where the character is going through hard times. This is that sucky part of the story. Just get through a few more pages, and it's going to have an amazing ending. — Ronda Rousey

They teach that having a story may be the most important part of your new venture; that fear can be useful; that having vast resources is not as critical as you might think; that simplicity is a core goal in successful enterprises; that trust is the most important quality you bring to your company; and, finally, that giving may be the best investment you'll ever make. — Blake Mycoskie

I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that's a successful story. — Shaun Tan

The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that, therefore, everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a second-grade education. — James Howard Kunstler

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate ...
... I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years ... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over. — Douglas Coupland

The story that you tell yourself is exactly what holds you back from being successful. — Jordan Belfort

In every successful still photographic project that I have completed, there has always been a turning point in the story where I felt that perhaps I was working on something that could be very special. — Mary Ellen Mark

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

The thing is that my first novel, which was basically a mystery adventure story, won quite an important award in Spain for young adult fiction, and because of this it became a very successful book, and right now it's some sort of a standard title, it's read widely in many high schools in Spain, so I think, in a way, I was a victim of my own success in the field of young adult fiction, because it was never my own natural register. I never intended to write that kind of fiction, but I became very successful at it. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Be Willing to Pay the Price If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all. MICHELANGELO Renaissance sculptor and painter who spent 4 years lying on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Behind every great achievement is a story of education, training, practice, discipline, and sacrifice. You have to be willing to pay the price. Maybe that price is pursuing one single activity while putting everything else in your life on hold. Maybe it's investing all of your own personal wealth or savings. Maybe it's the willingness to walk away from the safety of your current situation. But though many things are typically required to reach a successful outcome, the willingness to do what's required adds that extra dimension to the mix that helps you persevere in the face of overwhelming challenges, setbacks, pain, and even personal — Jack Canfield

At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention. — Julia Bacha

The more successful I got, the more scared I got. My name was all over Google. I had a Wikipedia page I was terrified to look at. And so I just snapped. I thought, 'If I'm going to come out with this, I'm going to do it in a big way. And not just for myself. This can't just be my story.' — Jose Antonio Vargas

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation. — Virginia Woolf

Until you understand your Core Story, whatever it is, and how it made you who you are today, your foundation will reflect only your unconscious beliefs about yourself, real or imagined, positive or negative. When you delve into your subconscious beliefs about your lot in life, whether you believe you deserve to be happy or sad, successful or unsuccessful, only then do you have the chance to change the story that is replaying over and over in your head and determining how you go through life. — Lucinda Bassett

Every successful story starts with a step regardless of its footprint size. — Ben Tolosa

I'm a southern girl from Arkansas and I am just tryin to do my thing in the business. To make a long story short I'm just trying to be successful at what I do and work hard. — Kiley Dean

Your doubts do nothing than pouring cold water on your enviable dreams. Just keep doubts away from you and you will not dilute your success story! — Israelmore Ayivor

I'm very happy to be a part of a very successful piece of art, as the 'Saw' films have been. One gets into this to participate. It's the coming together of a good story. So, that aspect of it has been just splendid. It really has nothing to do with me or my popularity. I'm fascinated. — Tobin Bell

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be. — Terry Brooks

Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers. The muddlers-through.
Politics is full of them ... so is businesses ... so is the church. They're popular. Successful. Some of them work hard, other are slack, but all of them could tell a good story.
Never where there such charming gravediggers in the world's history. — James Hilton

A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story. — Chuck Klosterman

I don't think it's a bad thing to play a character that's not necessarily a super-woman. Even if the character is a little bit stereotypical, as long as the whole story is good and positive, or makes some sort of important statement, I think it's okay. But, on the whole, you can't just do that, especially as a black woman. It's more of a responsibility. You've gotta let the world see black women being successful, strong, smart, with power and who are self-possessed. — Megalyn Echikunwoke

This is one of the most suspect things about the game form: A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades - and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong. — Tom Bissell

I advocate giving full attention to the pain that arises with the breakdown of an addiction and the story that embeds it. (The "addiction" can be something subtle, a self-image, for example, or thoughts about how ethical or successful one is.) Just as it feels good to meet a need, an unmet need hurts. Pain is its call for attention. When all the substitutes for meeting that need are exhausted, when all the palliatives stop working, finally the pain that had been diffuse and latent leads us to the need. — Charles Eisenstein

In business, you can have one massive success that earns $50 million overnight, and that's it. You're successful. End of story. But in the music business, you have to keep on doing it. — Noel Gallagher

Successful evangelism involves not only harvesting, but sowing and watering, too. We must never think that because a nonbeliever remained unconvinced by our case that our apologetic has failed. For one encounter is not the end of the story. — William Lane Craig

To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one centre of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as I know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests, created by all, has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues. — Kim Stanley Robinson

In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. — Ernst Jentsch

The successful man has enthusiasm. Good work is never done in cold blood; heat is needed for forge anything. Every great achievement is the story of a flaming heart. — Harry S. Truman

Good short-story collections, like good record albums, are almost always hit-and-miss affairs - successful if they include three or four great tracks, wildly successful if they have five. And that's as it should be. — Walter Kirn

One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind. — Larry Howes

I might not be as successful as you are today, but tomorrow, next month, next year, or five years from now will be another story. — Jon Jones

You know the reason The Beatles made it so big? ... 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That's what everyone wants. Not 24/7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche ... or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can't hide. Every single successful song of the past fifty years can be traced back to 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding. — David Levithan

The choice or decision to take on a film certainly isn't calculated as far as doing something that will be successful against something that will have a smaller audience. It's all a gamble to me, I don't bet on the horses; I just go with the story that speaks to me and that I feel strongly about which is this one [The Assassination of Jesse James]. — Brad Pitt