Quotes About Determination

If, after five years, I hadn't had anything published, I was just going to forget it and go back to TV full-time until I retired or they put me out to pasture.

I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.

I didn't get one word published until I was well into my 30s. But I always tried.

Getting your work published is a major struggle.

I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher right away and became an instant bestseller. One male critic called it the most shocking book he ever read.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

When it comes to my songs I'm confident. Back in 1967, I would go to a publisher's office, and tell them they just had to listen to my music.

I will not buck to pressure of delivering to publishers.

My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.

Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.

When my book was first sent out to publishers, my agent told me to buy a lot of ice-cream and wait. So I bought a gigantic amount of ice-cream, and huddled by the freezer eating it and shaking, hoping someone would like it.

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

In 1976, I read a book by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and knew immediately that I, too, could write a historical romance. It took me a year to complete the manuscript. I was a forty-year-old Scarborough housewife who knew no one in publishing.

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

When I was doing it, I just thought, 'I'm going to do this because it's fun.' I wasn't writing for a publisher or a publishing model; I didn't really think about it, but then, somehow, it worked out in my favor.

I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.

The age of 18 seemed the right time to try something different in my life. Moving to the U.K. was a risk, and I was never confident that I could ever make a full-time living being a musician, but I had to try. Initially, I worked as a jazz musician in pubs or with bands.

After school, instead of going into the restaurant scene, I very consciously took my guitar around everywhere I could, to Irish pubs and restaurants, and I played four nights a week to make ends meet.

When you play hockey, you don't have any fear. As soon as you step on the ice everything goes away and you're focusing on the puck and focusing on the play.

I just try to do my best to shoot the puck and we'll see what's going to happen with it.

I would go for the biggest guy on the team, dump the puck in. I would chase after it because I was very fast. If I wanted to get a big hit, I would have to leap into the guy. The guy would be maybe a 6-3 defenseman, 220, I would leap into this guy and plow him over. He would just fall to the ground. That was my thing.