I've had great success and I've had catastrophic failure. It's really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you I think.

The pressures are intense because the rewards for success and the penalty for failure are more and more.

Before this government came to power many failing schools were simply allowed to drift on in a pattern of continuing failure. The government is determined to break that pattern and is successfully doing so.

I think that failure by your own standards is certainly a form of success.

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success because either one gets in the way of your work.

The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan.

Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral.

So I try not to have any actual expectations for myself for any level of success or failure.

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.

Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together and if you're really working you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.