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.

Greatly begin. Though thou have time but for a line be that sublime. Not failure but low aim is crime.

Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive of course but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.

Far better is it to dare mighty things to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

The most important training though is to experience life as a writer questioning everything inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that all the other things will come if you don't there's no hope for you.

When you grow up in a family of languages you develop a kind of casual fluency so that languages though differently colored all seem transparent to experience.

Truth be told I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

Fundamental ideas are not a consequence of experience but a result of the particular constitution and activity of the mind which is independent of all experience in its origin though constantly combined with experience in its exercise.

Although we have in theory abolished human slavery recognized women's rights and stopped child labor we continue to enslave other species who if we simply pay attention show quite clearly that they experience parental love pain and the desire for freedom just as we do.

The experience gathered from books though often valuable is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

You can't dodge them all. I got hammered plenty of times through the years. But you just get up and keep playing. I can tell you from experience though. Sometimes it hurts like hell.

Although our inattention can contribute to our lack of total well-being we also have the power to choose positive behaviors and responses. In that choice we change our every experience of life!

Lord of the Rings was my first experience making movies and at the time I had no ideas how movies were done. I thought that's the way they're done so in a way I had nothing to compare it to.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

So that ends my first experience of matrimony which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.