Tom T. Hall Quotes

I think I've always been slightly addicted to not repeating myself. When you're doing something the first time around, it's often the best time. I think 'Blank Project' is about carrying on. Its that thing where you're making something because you have to, but you don't know how or why.

Failures in art usually lead to something else interesting.

You can't be afraid to fail. It's the only way you succeed - you're not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.

Pure innovation is more gross than error.

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

Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.

I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.

Every time you find something that doesn't work, you're a step closer to what does work.

Yes, we're trying some new stuff. Some of it might work. Some of it might not. This, of course, is the nature of episodic television. They can't all be gems.

An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.

When you're like, 'Yo, we gotta write a hit song, we need a hit song right now,' that never works. Every time that happens, I never write a hit song.

Almost nothing works the first time it's attempted. Just because what you're doing does not seem to be working, doesn't mean it won't work. It just means that it might not work the way you're doing it.

You don't have to get it right the first time.

His failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.

Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times.

I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail

In medicine, or in science, you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don’t have to go down that path again. In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government …

I've certainly had a number of failures along the way, depending on my own instincts and creativity, some fairly celebrated, at least during their time.

As an artist, you reflect the world around you. To do that, you must dive in, take risks, fall on your face, win, and sometimes lose a great deal.

I think if you don't risk something in art, it's not really important.

There is no science in creativity. If you don't give yourself room to fail, you won't innovate.

Studying James Fauntleroy, I learned it's okay to write a bad song. Just write another one the next day and hope that it's better.

I've taken a number of creative leaps, and some of them worked, and some of them didn't, but I don't regret any of them because you can't possibly get to the ones that work without the ones that don't.