Patti Smith Quotes

One moment you appear to be riding the crest of a wave, only to have the rug pulled away from you, bringing you back down to earth with a sickening thud.

As for success, I don't care for it. It is a fragile thing.

Winning had become kind of automatic, but I realized in 2008 that at any moment that could be taken away from me.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

You may have done 20 great shows in a row and come to one, and it doesn't work. You never presume anything.

If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin is.

This business can be so fickle, and a lot of times, hard work isn't enough.

It's so easy for all the success in the world to suddenly end, and I'm quite aware of that.

I have learnt the hard way that neither success nor failure last forever.

Every plan is a house of cards.

Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

Everyone asks, Will he make it, will she make it? You never make it.

All careers go up and down like friendships, like marriages, like anything else, and you can't bat a thousand all the time.

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.

Success is not forever and failure isn't fatal.

If you're in the game long enough, you're going to be the toast of the town one day, and the next day you'll be toast.

The roof might fall in; anything could happen.

Success and failure are both part of life. Both are not permanent.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.

If you're young and wild, you tend to believe your clippings. One day you're Hemingway. The next day you're nothing.

It's feast or famine in showbiz.

Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter - Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes - A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting.

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.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.