Stephen Chow Quotes

Everybody wants to make something they think is a surefire winner, though nobody knows what a surefire winner is, in my opinion.

WeWork is my fifth venture. I failed in my first, second and third, had mediocre success in the fourth.

I guess you can say I always liked to take chances. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't.

If everything you do works, then you're not taking many risks and probably aren't innovating either.

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

It might be a huge hit, it might not; but you learn something doing it.

We don't grow unless we take risks. Any successful company is riddled with failures.

I think when you take the big swings - and I've done plenty of big swings that I was told were never going to work - those are always the things that break through.

The slightest thing can ruin a scene, but you must be willing to take chances.

With innovation, there is always risk.

Nine out of ten businesses fail; so I came up with a foolproof plan - create ten businesses.

You get the idea. Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once. There are no rules. You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it's because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over. It's the greatest thrill in the world and it runs away screaming at the first sight of bullet points.

Play is experimenting with chance.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.

Risk is an essential part of progress.

THERE'S NO OTHER WAY to find out whether or not you'll be successful other than just doing it

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

To do something that you feel in your heart that's great, you need to make a lot of mistakes. Anything that's successful is a series of mistakes.

As an actor, I'm rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't.

I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it's going to work or whether I'm going to fall flat on my face.

Rodgers & Hart had a few flops before they clicked. You know, it happens. I don't know anyone who always gets away with everything.

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

In certain businesses, I would say 10 failures to one success is a perfectly acceptable ratio. Because the failures die pretty quickly, they're not that expensive, and the successes can be really huge.

After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.