The Saturday Writing Post — on failure

Interviewer Stephanie Stephens: “Is there one thing in life you’d like to undo?”

Actor Jeffrey Tambor: “No, and I’ll tell you why. All merits and all mistakes produce all the colors on your palette, and the interesting thing about acting or any art is that the mistakes are as valuable as the merits. So I’ve gotten great lessons from errors in my life. You have to make mistakes.”

– Jeffrey Tambor, interviewed in Parade, May 7, 2017

(Photo by Leslie: the bridge over the Swan River, at Bigfork)

The Saturday Writing Post — on failure, again

Maybe it’s because I’m working on something completely new, writing a novel without a contract for the first time in six years, that all the quotes in my collection that jump out at me are about failure. < sigh > Reading them is helpful — as was the sight of a hillside full of my favorite wildflower, the arrowleaf balsamroot. I hope the quotes are useful to you, too.

“[Successful novelists] know that success is never a sure thing and that failure is always an option. Writing is intimidating and scary, but also exciting, because the most important things we do in life involve some risk.”

– John Freeman, author of How to Read a Novelist, in The Writer, Oct 2013