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.

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.

Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and thus his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.

Their lives have been largely defined by failure and you would think the prospect of marriage which is supposed to be bountiful and hopeful it's just really another kind of tangential thing in his life.

As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.

We judged that a sudden disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy with lower equity prices further downward pressure on home values and less access to credit for companies and households.

This is true enough but success is the next best thing to happiness and if you can't be happy as a success it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper truer happiness in failure.

I think I've failed every test I've ever taken. If there was a failure I would have been it.

If I didn't have children I think my life would be a failure.

We do not realise that we are children of eternity. If we did then success would be no success and failure would be no failure to us.

There would seem to be a limit even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure a mere experimentation.

Nixon's grand mistake was his failure to understand that Americans are forgiving and if he had admitted error early and apologized to the country he would have escaped.

I've tried to handle winning well so that maybe we'll win again but I've also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball but to sport.

I think some parents now look at a youngster failing as the final thing. It's a process and failure is part of the process. I would like it if the teacher and the parents would connect more. I think that used to be but we're losing a little bit of that right now.

In high school in sport I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure.

A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.

So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.