Success depends in a very large measure upon individual initiative and exertion, and cannot be achieved except by a dint of hard work.
~ Anna Pavlova
I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
~ Thomas A. Edison
My parents are very proud of my success but still worry, as I'm in a profession where there is no guarantee of work. They have always supported my decision to go into acting, but there have been tough times work-wise.
~ David Harewood
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.
~ John Ruskin
Temporary success can be achieved in spite of lack of other fundamental qualities, but no advancements can be maintained without hard work.
~ William Feather
We do not celebrate people who have made success out of serious hard work.
~ Iain Duncan Smith
So I feel like success is opportunity plus preparation, so work begets work, and as long as you're prepared it's going to continue to come your way.
~ Anthony Mackie
At Princeton I gained a great deal of pleasure from success in my classes. knowing that I could accomplish those things, and I realized that my success was directly proportionate to the work I put in.
~ Brooke Shields
Whatever success I may have attained is due to the fact that since I was old enough to work at all, my ambition has never deserted me.
~ Anna Held
You take all the things that frighten you, and when you can get them to work for you all of sudden people are calling you a success.
~ Randy Bachman
Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person.
~ John Forbes Nash
Choose something you like to do. I know it's a cliche, and you've heard it over and over. But the reason is, you're going to have to work long and hard to achieve any success. You better like it or life is going to be terrible.
~ Bill Kurtis
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
~ Warren Beatty
Rockefeller once explained the secret of success. 'Get up early, work late - and strike oil.'
~ Joey Adams
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
~ Salman Rushdie
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
~ Paul Dirac
I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.
~ Adrian Mckinty
Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.
~ Simon Callow
There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.
~ Philip Schultz
I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.
~ Taylor Swift
I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.
~ Patti Smith
Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.
~ Junot Díaz
In much of computer science, I can easily 'auto-grade' your work and give you an instant meaningful feedback. I can't do this when it comes to the subtlety of human thought, language, poetry, philosophy.
~ Sebastian Thrun
I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.
~ Michael Dirda
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
~ Paul Auster
I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.
~ Mark Haddon
Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.
~ Mary Lambert
My work should be seen as poetry.
~ Robert Wilson
There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.
~ Edward Hirsch
When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
~ Mary Oliver
Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
~ Donald Hall
As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.
~ Jane Campion
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
~ James Fenton
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
~ Günter Grass
Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
~ Wislawa Szymborska
Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.
~ Andrew Motion
I thought it would be a funny concept to publish a book about stand-up comedy with Faber, the poetry publisher, and to apply to stand-up the same sort of weight of annotation that you would to a classic work of literature, an epic poem. I thought that would be funny.
~ Stewart Lee
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
~ Raoul Vaneigem
