His advice to me is basically to just love what you do and don't let the fear of failure stop you.

Most employees want to be involved in a successful business and most employees are happy for people running successful businesses to be paid a reasonable wage and a market rate for it provided they understand the reason. What they hate most of all is pay for failure.

Success is always less funny than failure.

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

In Britain by contrast we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America.

America thinks of itself as a meritocracy so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure.

I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions we have not created a civil society.

Don't come home a failure.

I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.