James E. Gunn Quotes

The rules of survival never change, whether you're in a desert or in an arena.

Human beings will make the best out of any situation.

'Existence' is about the world of roughly 2050, and terrible things have happened, but guess what? People have reacted to the terrible things by coping, as they always have.

Crisis creates opportunity.

Don't worry about what happens when things go wrong; just accept that they're going to, and figure out how do you want to cope with it when it does.

You need to learn a practical lesson. Grit alone is not going to save you from sinking.

All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.

Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.

The human race never solves any of its problems, it only outlives them.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Tragedy brings change, and that's what I'm interested in most - how people plunge into change and try to fight, then eventually move with it with grace.

Out of economic hardship can come change - we are suddenly cast onto our wits and our talents and our resources and our strengths, as we lose all the choices we once had.

It is wise for us to forget our troubles, there are always new ones to replace them.

I've had great success and I've had catastrophic failure. It's really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you, I think.

I always try to adjust to the situation.

When times get tough, at some point, people instinctively know they need to lighten up in order to get through it.

As a species, we tend to be doers, forever shaping and reshaping the world to better suit our purposes.

Life is not what it's supposed to be. It's what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.

Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.

Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.

When something really extreme happens, you have to find a way to embrace that and include it in how you think about the character. Sometimes it's not easy.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

I learned a lot in those first years in Miami, while struggling just for survival, by observing my father's fortitude.

Difficult times disrupt your conventional ways of thinking and push you to forge better habits of thought, performance and being.

When there are things that don't go according to plan, London will cope.