Randall Munroe Quotes

Much of what we're going to try will not work, and much of what does work will do so for unanticipated reasons.

Sometimes, even the very best course of action fails.

U2's best work has always been when we didn't know what we're doing.

The BBC knew I was successful from early on, but they weren't sure why, and they still aren't sure. What I do has been unconventional from the beginning, so they've never been sure. It just works. It just does.

Technology is like the ante in a poker game. It is the price you pay to play the game. But it doesn't mean you are going to win.

Every start on an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to succeed.

Nothing works until it does. Nobody knows anything. You don't know what people are going to respond to. People are always surprised by stuff.

You can't always expect to work with a director who guarantees success.

You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.

In a lot of formats, you can be really experimental and see what would happen.

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.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.

There are 9 rejected ideas for every idea that works.

It's a crapshoot, publishing.

Whether I fall on my feet or fall on my arse, I dunno. You've got to take those risks.

You know, the music business is like the Lotto. Just put your numbers down and sometimes they hit, and sometimes they don't. There's just no rhyme or reason.

It might be a huge hit, it might not; but you learn something doing it.

The idea of trying to predict what people will or won't respond to is risky.

The game is a game, and things happen, and you can't always execute your plan as perfectly as you'd like to.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

You can't predict a show, that is the damndest thing, you can't predict if a show is going to work or not until it's on the air.

There's nothing efficient about innovation.

You can predict all you want, but everybody knows what predictions get you.