The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover it is kept alive by hope and fear by childish faith and by cowardice.

Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful it's tough it's buried in our mythic childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.

I went to a motivational training course once a course of self-discovery and I found out after a week that my fear - it was not a fear of not being accepted - was a very violent fear of failure.

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Failure is a great teacher and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences then you've got something to share.

The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.

Don't be afraid to fail. Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It's OK to fail. If you're not failing you're not growing.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery and the projections of the Bush Administration.

Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.