Fran Lebowitz Quotes

Oftentimes the shows that don't work help you get it right.

Failing is part of my process. A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb 7 times to make it good. So I tweak it.

So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they've failed more often than everyone else.

Often I'll try things that just won't happen the way I'd like them to, so hearing that they're not working saves me some wear and tear the next time around.

I did it the stupid way, through trial and error.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it. What technologies tend to do is they tend to make a lot of mistakes... but then we go back and aggressively attack those mistakes - and fix them. And you usually recover pretty quickly.

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

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

Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.

I just try to learn from every mistake that I make so that I never make them again.

You make mistakes that you want to learn from, that you don't want to happen again, and that's what I try to do.

I feel like as a young player you have to play consistently because you're going to make mistakes. If you make mistakes you have to keep playing to learn from mistakes.

Mr. Edison worked endlessly on a problem, using the method of elimination. If a person asked him if he were discouraged because so many attempts proved unavailing, he would say, "No, I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.".

I repeat it until it works. It is important to record, otherwise you lose ideas. That's why I never stay away from the studio, I always [have] something to ask.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

Sometimes there's something that you need a few takes to get it and if it takes 15 takes, it takes 15 takes. It really depends.

The nature of process, to one degree or another, involves failure. You have at it. It doesn’t work. You keep pushing. It gets better. But it’s not good. It gets worse. You got at it again. Then you desperately stab at it, believing “this isn’t going to work.” And it does!

Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.

It takes sixty-five thousand errors before you are qualified to make a rocket.

Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error.

As you begin to take action toward the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, you must realize that not every action will be perfect. Not every action will produce the desired result. Not every action will work. Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.

In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.