A Quote by Scott Kenemore

Columbia is ... for people whose genitals still work, dammit. For writers who want to be brave and persevere in the real world where people often fail.

Scott Kenemore

Quote Topics

Be Brave Brave Columbia Fail Often People Persevere Real Real World Still The Real World Want Whose Work World Writers

Quote Author

Scott Kenemore
American - Novelist
Born: 1977

In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ. Also, the idea that intelligence can be gauged by an IQ test is erroneous.

Camille Paglia

What I want to see is more mixed casts. We need it. People need to be brave - in the real world, everyone and anyone is around. So if people get to see themselves on the stage, they'll want to come.

Cynthia Erivo

It is true you can be successful without [college], but this is a hard world, a real world, and you want every advantage you can have. I would suggest to people to do all that you can. When I dropped out of school, I had worked in the music industry and had checks cut in my name from record labels and had a record deal on the table, and when I wasn’t successful and Columbia said, ’We’ll call you,’ I had to go back and work a telemarketing job, go back to the real world, and that’s how life is. Life is hard. Take advantage of your opportunities.

Kanye West

Fail fast. Fail often... The most talented people in the world have bad ideas. That's a good thing to learn.

Rashida Jones

We were definitely new to the whole music thing. The first album was a real collaborative effort between us, the writers, and the A&R people at Columbia Records. We really worked to find out what our sound was.

Kevin Jonas

The stability of global financial markets is a public good. If governments fail to protect this public good, then those who suffer are the working people of the world whose jobs, whose homes, and whose standard of living depends on it.

Kevin Rudd

I think that very often younger writers don't appreciate how much hard work is involved in writing. The part of writing that's magic is the thinnest rind on the world of creation. Most of a writer's life is just work. It happens to be a kind of work that the writer finds fulfilling in the same way that a watchmaker can happily spend countless hours fiddling over the tiny cogs and bits of wire. ... I think the people who end up being writers are people who don't get bored doing that kind of tight focus in small areas.

Diane Ackerman

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.

James A. Michener

It's pretty exciting to take real people living in the real world, their opinions, and have people have to react to that. As opposed to their perceptions of what people are thinking, which are often very different.

Sheryl Sandberg

When I go on stage man I just want people to have fun, I don't want people to think about their problems, I want people to get energy and nutrition and food from that so they can go back into the real world and work on their problems.

Jon Fishman

I've gotten a lot of people saying. 'That is awesome. You're so brave.' I hate when people say brave. I'm not brave. I'm just living my life. Why is that brave?

Oksana Masters

We're missing a lot of the real-life stories of what people's work looks like. Those are the people that I want sitting on the zoning board meetings, on the zoning commissions. Those are the people I want participating in business improvement in their own industry. The gentrification processes that often happen in cities so often manifest in street sweeps of sex workers. How do you get sex workers on neighborhood associations, regarded as members of the neighborhood?

Melissa Gira Grant

The time has come for writers to become inaccessible again. The reason is not some kind of 'mystique' that makes people curious (though it helps), but the fact that no real writers ever lay down anything real in public-they work in solitude, they think hard, and their thoughts are rarely nice or 'friendly.'

Andrei Codrescu

Male genitals are still called "the tree of life" by the Arabs, and a cross was one of the oldest diagrammatic images of male genitals.

Barbara G. Walker

Maybe we don't put our young people in situations often enough where they're allowed to fail. When you fail you gain experience, and with enough experience, you don't fail as often.