Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

Nobody likes to fail. I want to succeed in everything I do, which isn’t much. But the things that I’m really passionate about, if I fail at those, if I’m not successful, what do I have?

Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor.

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

It’s much easier to be successful than it is to be relevant. The tricks won’t keep you relevant. Tricks might keep you popular for a while, but in all honesty, I don’t know how U2 will stay relevant. I know we’ve got a future. I know we can fill stadiums. And yet with every record, I think, ‚Is this it? Are we still relevant?‘

Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

I explain the law of compensation like this: ‚Returns are minimal in spite of massive effort at the start, yet returns can be massive with minimal effort over time.

Once you start a working on something, don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.

If you look at the history of Notre Dame, if you hire a coach who’s been successful at another college program, they’re going to be ultra successful at Notre Dame because the talent will always be there.

That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.

The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.

Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try something.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

You aren’t going to find anybody that’s going to be successful without making a sacrifice and without perseverance.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

Applause waits on success.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.

The reason I don’t tour is that I don’t know how to front a band. What would I do? I can’t really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

Touring is very routine. You get to the city, you go to the hotel, you got to be at the hotel by a certain time – it’s very routine. I’m not a very structured person, so when I get some structure, it’s cool; it’s good for me.

I used to feel unsafe right in the moment of an accomplishment – I felt the ground fall from under my feet because this could be the end. And even now, while everyone is celebrating, I’m on to the next thing. I don’t want to get lost in this big cushion of success.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it’ll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.

I don’t measure my success anymore by the Grammys. I can’t because I’ll just end up crushed.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

Aim for the highest.

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

We work to become, not to acquire.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.

No matter what happens on the field, getting an education makes you a winner.

I don’t think about that. I wasn’t a kid growing up saying one day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech. That wasn’t on my mind. So what I do is the best work I can do.

If you can build a business up big enough, it’s respectable.

As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they’re in the kitchen cooking. So it’s understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

I care very deeply about the people at Tesla. I feel like I have a great debt to the people of Tesla who are making the company successful.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin‘.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

My unpredictability is what separates me. If you move in so many ways, your opponent is not focused on what he’s doing. He’s focusing in on what you’re doing, and it freezes him. When they freeze and you hit, they shatter like glass.

Fame hit me like a ton of bricks.

A #2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere.