And obviously with hindsight now now knowing what went on in the company it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company most senior person in the United Kingdom come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that and frankly that's a failure of Parliament.

Our managers hadn't had that kind of success - the record company hadn't we hadn't - and the feeling was that the next record had to be even bigger and if it wasn't it would be some kind of failure.

When I got Jacob's Latter I was nervous because I felt I wasn't allowed to fail. I felt that they were waiting for one little failure and that would prove them right and I'd be 'out of there.'

I'm fascinated by failure and I'm fascinated by finality. Shakespeare's historical plays are more universal than his comedies because they relate to the finality of life. Without finality life would not be beautiful.

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.