I was attending the University of Alberta. I was going to be a high school teacher like my parents. I failed - no I didn't fail a class I just barely passed. I really didn't try. It was Canadian history through the plays of the time. My God those were boring plays.

My physics teacher Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

I'm not going to give a courtesy gift to a person who's going to win and I'm not going to give a sympathy gift to a person who's going to lose.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

You can take Elvis. You can take Marilyn Monroe. Success and fame will not be the answer if something inside of you is bothering you if things in your mind aren't going right.

I always envisioned myself being a rapper and being in the game and having success but you never know what it feels like or how you're going to be when you're there.

Success is a process a quality of mind and way of being an outgoing affirmation of life.

I came from a family where I felt great pressure to be financially successful and I felt that staying in Chicago and doing theater I was in all likelihood not going to find financial success.

If the film is a hit then everyone shares the success. If it is going to be a disaster then it might as well be because of me not because of somebody else.

I had come to the point when I realized it was unlikely that my film career was going to move beyond a certain level of role. And I was - because I had graphic instances of it - handicapped by the success of Star Trek. A director would say 'I don't want Jean-Luc Picard in my movie' - and this was compounded by X-Men as well.

The real end winner of NAFTA is going to be Mexico because we have the human capital. We have that resource that is vital to the success of the U.S. economy.

I don't think success has changed us as people at all. We are the same lunatics that we were when this band first got going. We never see ourselves as being on a higher level than our fans.

If you can go out with your live show and turn people on to that where you have that fan base that's religious and they're going to come see you when you're in that town once your radio success is gone and you're not a mainstream guy anymore you can still go out and play your shows.

The whole secret to our success is being able to con ourselves into believing that we're going to change the world because statistically we are unlikely to do it.

Well you can't be trying to achieve success of any kind in this business without accepting that there's going to be a flip side to it.

When everything happens to you when you're so young you're very lucky but by the same token you're never going to have that same feeling again. The first time anything happens to you - your first love your first success - the second one is never the same.

You can never be comfortable with your success you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.

I believe success is preparation because opportunity is going to knock on your door sooner or later but are you prepared to answer that?

When somebody has an enormous success in this culture people start asking two questions which are 'What are you doing now?' and 'How are you going to beat that?' And I have to say I love the assumption that your intention is to beat yourself constantly - that you're in battle against yourself.

Which is - you know like check it out I'm pretty young I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book right?

I planned my success. I knew it was going to happen.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to and maybe the first time you do it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

It was so draining. Going to parties to rub elbows with so-and-so and act like it's no big deal when really all I was doing was hoping I'd have the success they had.

I don't know what keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder... I think it's just pure perseverance and wanting to succeed and having that burning desire to always have success.