success
Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself…
Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959 ), 12.
The sooner you establish a routine, the more smoothly your collaboration will advance.
The Collaborative Habit, written with Jesse Kornbluth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 26.
Most people, after one success, are so cringingly afraid of doing less well that they rub all the edge off their subsequent work.
Potter quoted in the biography Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature by Linda Lear (New York: St. Martin’s Griffen, 2008), 246.
The need for success and the fear of failure are two aspects of the same inner attitude. For it isn’t failure that causes the sinking sensation we all know, but the fear of failure. Failure isn’t the enemy—fear is. One learns, after all, by failing. This is elementary; we all know it, except when it applies to ourselves…
The Work of Craft (London: Arcana, 1986), 16.
A career is built one paragraph at a time. I wrote six books and a blue-million articles before anything of mine hit the bestseller lists. I don’t know any shortcuts. But if you’re really a writer, that’s no problem, because you’d rather be writing than anything else.
Frequently Asked Questions, www.barbarakingsolver.net (now replaced with new FAQs)
The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again. And not just wrong, but messy. A shockingly large number of transformative ideas in the annals of science can be attributed to contaminated laboratory environments. Alexander Fleming famously discovered the medical virtues of penicillin when the mold accidentally infiltrated a culture of Staphylococcus.
Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Riverhead, 2010), 134.
They say that I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with, and they say that like it’s a bad thing.
Induction speech, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, originally broadcast on Fuse TV, March 20, 2011.