Success Quote by Jane Rule

Austere and a little defiant, "I believe only in art and failure" reads like a personal creed built from distrust. Jane Rule isn’t praising misery; she’s naming the only two forces that reliably resist pretense. Art, for Rule, is where experience gets shaped without being sanitized. Failure is where the social script breaks and you find out what you actually wanted, feared, or refused. Put them together and you get a worldview that won’t bargain with respectability.

The line works because it flips the expected moral hierarchy. We’re trained to "believe in" progress, institutions, happy endings, maybe even love. Rule chooses art (a practice, not a doctrine) and failure (an outcome we’re told to hide). It’s a refusal of the success narrative as the measure of a life, especially for someone writing from the margins of mid-century North American culture. As a lesbian novelist and essayist who lived through eras when public legitimacy for queer life was conditional at best, Rule understood how "success" often meant compliance: passing, smoothing the rough edges, keeping the story palatable. Failure, then, can be a kind of honesty - the evidence you didn’t contort yourself into an approved shape.

There’s also a writer’s private joke in it: faith, but with skepticism intact. Art is the attempt. Failure is the likely result. The belief isn’t in triumph; it’s in the work, and in what the work costs.