Tom DeMarco Quotes

With risk, sometimes you have tremendous success, sometimes not so much.

In football, there are no guarantees.

It's a miracle when something actually turns out well because there are so many ways for it to go wrong.

I used to write things out beforehand. But sometimes it backfires.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

You can't always expect to work with a director who guarantees success.

Don't take too much comfort in the fact that you're successful today because tomorrow could bring failure. There's no surety in life.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

I know the nature of comedy, and you never know what will happen with the next movie or whether people will find it funny.

We know there is no such thing as freedom without the risk of failure.

You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.

It's a crapshoot, publishing.

Whether I fall on my feet or fall on my arse, I dunno. You've got to take those risks.

You know, the music business is like the Lotto. Just put your numbers down and sometimes they hit, and sometimes they don't. There's just no rhyme or reason.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

There are no environments where you're only going to win, because life just isn't like that.

You can't predict a show, that is the damndest thing, you can't predict if a show is going to work or not until it's on the air.

Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.

It's been up, down, and sideways for me, man. I could become a huge star, or I could get cancer tomorrow.

You don't ever know with films. You just hope for the best, but sometimes it's a bit of a crapshoot.

Betting on the success of innovative technologies in the marketplace can carry all the uncertainty and risk that betting on the next card in the deck does at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. There is a factor of randomness that must be factored in, but precisely how to do so is anyone's guess.

Success will be accepted in due course. Whereas should we fail, this will be regarded as the mad venture of a fool.

Luck is not scalable. Luck is not a national strategy.

There is no guaranteed formula. And that's one of the interesting things about filmmaking. You could put $115 million in, and it doesn't guarantee success.

You can never assume that something is going to do well.