Alternative Success Quotes

Pantera is a marquee band, with the most diehard fans. We sold over 20 million records without MTV or radio.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

There are five kids in my family and I'm the only one who didn't get a diploma. All the kids got their diplomas hanging in my father's room and I got my gold records. I'd say he was more proud of the diplomas.

So many times, I watch games and think, 'Man, why is that guy trying to score like that? He can't do it.' But he's been told his whole life, 'You have to go get 40 if you want to be one of the top dogs.' It's my goal to build a lane where you can be a top dog, and you don't gotta go get that 40. You can go get four and still be a top dog.

There's not a lot of precedent for weird, bald musicians in the Lower East Side making records in their bedrooms and going on to sell a lot of copies of the record. Especially if you look at the pop climate.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, 'schooling,' but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prison.

If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right.

I am evidence that you don't have to sell a lot of records or succeed in the usual way to have a big audience and a job.

Cult movies are basically movies Hollywood missed the first time - that they should have gotten - and then the fans got it and made it successful.

I don't think about financial success as the measurement of my success.

I don't believe the most successful people are the ones who got the best grades, got into the best schools, or made the most money.

I'm a rock star because I couldn't be a soccer star.

Success to me does not mean money.

Success in life does not necessarily originate with academic success.

I wasn't a good school pupil. I was interested in business.

Bands like R.E.M. and even The Replacements, during that initial wave of college rock, would sell 40, 50, 100,000 copies of a record, and that would be seen as extremely successful - and definitely enough to keep doing more.

One of the things that continually surprised people with the kind of shows I do, is that we try and find people who aren't doing jobs that are traditionally aspirational but who have nevertheless prospered and found real contentment doing it.

I'm not an artist that has a big, huge radio record that's going to be on BET. I'm not, at this point, gunning for like, "Oh, I'm gonna kill them in the first week." But as people slowly discover the album they realize it's better than a lot of what they've been listening to all year.

For me, victory isn't measured by winning in the traditional sense.

My daughter went to the school, and it's a very, very progressive and liberal school, and my commencement speech was telling the kids just to always be willing to quit, and that they need to quit a lot in their lives, and keep on quitting, because all the happiness I've ever got was when I turned my back on things that everybody else thought would make you happy. I can smell parents' stomach acid right now, but they know that whole "You gotta get a job and you gotta settle for what people perceive as success" thing is really absurd.

Go on being uncommercial. There's a lot of money in it.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

There aren't always, especially in low-income communities, the arts and the dance and the drama and the things that can really show a kid, 'Look, even if I'm three years behind in math, there's something I'm good at that can help me be successful in life.'

I thought I'd be on TV and movies - that's what I really wanted - and I can't believe I didn't need to do that. I did it on my own with just me and my camera. That's very, very weird.