Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

People change and forget to tell each other.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.

You lose your manners when you are poor.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night matter not at all.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

I think people always believe what they want to believe, don't you?

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

With failure, you just try again.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

The moral turpitude of the boys of today appears to center in their failure to concentrate on any particular objective long enough to obtain their maximum results.

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.

The failure of Socialism since 1945 is that whilst encouraging us all, the creators of wealth, to produce less through strikes, it has caused us all to demand a higher level of our own product.

The assertion of failure coming from such persons does not mean that Mr. Mill failed to promote the practical success of those objects the advocacy of which forms the chief feature of his political writings.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.

Don't come home a failure.