Bret Harte Quotes

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn't have a darkroom, but that didn't stop me from photographing.

I was a very, very careful printer when I used 8-by-10 film. I probably spent more time on printing than anything else. The more the prints were appreciated, the more time I spent on them.

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.

'Humans of New York' did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one!

Write about it by day and dream about it by night.

If you are interested in photography because you love it and are obsessed with it, you must be self-motivated, a perfectionist, and relentless.

(I) try new things and give myself permission to fail and experiment because only that way can you get really successful.

If success were easy, then it would not necessarily be true success. Some of history's most successful people learned to cope with failure as a natural offshoot of the experimental and creative process and often learned more from their failures than their successes. By taking the attitude that failure is merely a detour on the way to our destination, hope can blossom into success.

For some reason there's this myth that creativity - [especially] in terms of creative writing - is a gift you either have, or you don't. So when people first start writing, if they write something that's not very good, or if they try and it's difficult, they go, "Oh, I guess I don't have it." That doesn't seem very fair, you have to try and you have to work at it. If we get scared of one bad poem and quit, that's not doing anybody any good.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

That's just a part of being an artist: you can't write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you'd be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.

I learned by reading an awful lot and by writing a half a million words of stuff nobody would do anything with except wrap old fish.

Founders: there is no shame in failing, take pride in that you have the guts to try something new.

You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you're going to autograph them and sell them at auction.

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

More times than not, it's a failed endeavor. You will fail more times than you succeed. But I think you need those failed endeavors.

Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.

Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.

When you're experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, and you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion.

James Franco, acting, teaching, directing, writing, producing, photography, soundtracks, editing - is there anything you can do?

F@*# self-doubt. I despise it. I hold it in contempt, along with the hell-spawned ooze-pit of Resistance from which it crawled. I will NEVER back off. I will NEVER give the work anything less than 100%. If I go down in flames, so be it. I'll be back.