A Quote by John Backus

You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.
The trouble with a great many men is that they spread themselves out over too much ground. They fail in everything. If they would only put their life into one channel, and keep it in, they would accomplish something. They make no impression because they do a little work here and a little work there....Lay yourselves on the altar of God, and then concentrate on some one work.
I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: "Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.
What's frustrating as an actor, when you want to work hard, you can only work once that phone rings and then you can only work until the production wraps. Then you have to find another job.
Work Does Not Need You, You Need Work. Through Work, Destiny Unfolds. Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it.
We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee to fail intelligently... to experiment over and over again and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
And it's very hard to do this stuff too because there are so many effects movies being done, so many companies busy doing this work and the public just wants to see it. Good work is being done all over the world.
We aren't defined by our work. People think if you over-identify with your work, then that must mean you're giving over too much of yourself to it, that there's something wrong with that. We're trained to believe in things like work-life balance. So much work is tending towards service. It's very much about creating experiences rather than products, and it makes those boundaries between life and work very slippery.
Value investing doesn't always work. The market doesn't always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn't work. And that is a very good thing. The fact that our value approach doesn't work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.
Discover the times when you're most creative - mornings, nights, afternoons - and clear the time to work then. Many writers find the mornings are best, and the afternoons are only good for editorial corrections, or getting the washing done. Others can only work through the night, drunk.
The thing about theater that always and still kind of makes me edgy is that you work and work and work and work, and then you're just in performance mode, and then you have to just be on; the work is done, and then you just have to do it over and over again, so you're just constantly at that performance level.
The most important thing is that, when you work with somebody, you build a rapport with that person. They have a certain trust in you. You don't have to explain that much. It's very hard when you photograph someone who's a fresh face and then you don't work with them again for six months. All these people I work with over and over again have qualities that I love. There's something very free about them or there are some slight imperfections about them. I think the more you work with someone, the pictures get better and better.
As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
A work of art does not need an explanation. The work has to speak for itself. The work may be subject to many interpretations, but only one was in the mind of the artist. Some artists say to make the work readable for the public is an artist’s responsibility, but I don’t agree with that. The only responsibility to be absolutely truthful to the self. My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing.
I always listen to music when I write! I basically make a playlist for every essay; sometimes it's just one song, or three songs, over and over and over. I sort of find the emotional pitch of the piece, and then match music to it, and then the music becomes a shortcut to the feeling, so I can enter it and work anywhere: on planes, cafes, at work, the train.
We have to have the money to do the work we want to do, as well as to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Fat commissions are good, but not always easy to come by, and each new painting takes its time. So we need to find every way possible to earn extra income from our work.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!