It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.

When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.

It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.

I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

My point is that the great challenge of an artist is to balance those two things: to be strong enough to have your own personal vision that you will put on the page or the canvas or the screen, no matter what people say, but it requires a radical sensitivity. You have to be completely open to what the world is telling you, to what your audience tells you. And balancing those two things is nearly impossible.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.