Steven Holl Quotes

What my father especially taught me was to not always take the safe road, the easy road. If you are going to do good work, you have to risk failing badly.

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.

If you have one good idea, people will lend you twenty.

A good idea is about ten percent and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent.

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank.

You have to have a ton of passion for what you're doing because being an entrepreneur is probably twice as hard as you think it's going to be. The good news is that it's probably twice as much fun when it's going well.

It's only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you're not expressing the utmost of your human experience.

No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.

You only do good work when you're taking risks and pushing yourself.

My motto is more, 'If you want to find something new, look for something new!' There is a certain amount of risk in this attitude, as even the slightest failure tends to be resounding, but you are so happy when you succeed that it is worth taking the risk.

I feel like every time I take on a movie, it's important that the possibility of failure exists, and of the unknown, because it's a challenge to do something I haven't done before and something I have to try to work out.

It's important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.

When you're doing something that you think - that you know - is a breakthrough, you cannot obsess about the possibility of failure. That is just not a great place to go.

I realized I really liked the screen. I knew it was a challenge, but I wasn't afraid of risk.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories.

I think the most important trait for an entrepreneur is persistence. When you try to do something new and difficult, you are more likely to fail than to succeed.

When I look at the success I have, it's because of my creative-thinking skills.

I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook, but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash.

Ingenuity, plus courage, plus work, equals miracles.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.

Problems are good. Impossible problems are even better.

Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try.

So many people wait around for funding, and if they're unsuccessful, they don't make the film; if you've got a good idea, that seems so pointless. There's always a way of doing it; you've just got to find it.