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.

We go there with confidence but we know there is a very fine line between success and failure in this game.

The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you've got playing the leads.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco... a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.

The will to persevere is often the difference between failure and success.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself I have failed three times and what happens when he says I am a failure.

The world is given to me only once not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences for this barrier does not exist.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.