Quotes About Determination

Over the years, I've learned that if you can just hang in there and, regardless of what's presented to you, take it as a challenge and try to bring in something fresh, then it works.

I want the same thing I've wanted since I was 7 years old. I want to be No. 1.

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

I started playing chess when I was five years old. I learned the moves from my mother, then worked with my father - and later trainers. My style became very technical. I sacrificed a lot of things. I was always hunting for the king, for the mate. I'd forget about my other pieces.

There's no such thing as a good time. I started an apparel-manufacturing business in the tech-boom years. I mean, come on. Get out of your garage and go take a chance and start your business.

If you believe that your best years are behind you, you've guaranteed they are; I'm going to dance into that good night, with the oldies turned up loud.

I worked at comedy clubs - if I can use the term 'work' - for several years. I middled at one point. I never made it; I was never a headliner. I never made enough time to write enough good material, in my opinion.

I think my stubbornness, hardheadedness and stupidity is what has allowed me to play for 20 years.

At 15 years of age, I left school to practice the profession of Office Boy in a business firm in Salem, Oregon.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It's just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wife, who was ice dancing at the Rockefeller Center ice rink.

By making a comeback, I'm changing the attitude of people toward me. If I'd known that people would react so enthusiastically, I'd have done it years ago.

No leader did more for his country than Winston Churchill. Brave, magnanimous, traditional, he was like a king-general from Britain's heroic past. His gigantic qualities set him apart from ordinary humanity; there seemed no danger he feared, no effort too great for his limitless energies.

I was never the big leaper, the dunker, the long and athletic kid who looked the part of a traditional basketball star. Truth be told, I wasn't even considered a top guard coming out of my recruiting class.

I grew up in a very traditional family, but there was never anything I didn't think I could do.

'Traffic' was so good, and I really don't want to take a step back.

I do have a touch of OCD, and I used to obsess about research. But I'm better than I was. Gone are the days when I would drive to a set of traffic lights to find out if you could turn left. I finally realised it didn't matter. A book will not stand or fall on whether or not there's a branch of Starbucks in Brixton.

Most of the women in Greek tragedies have their fates predetermined. The gods dictate that such and such will happen to them, and everything they predict comes true. Not Medea.

I'm not so naive as to think that everybody always succeeds, right? I mean, half of Shakespeare's stories are tragedies - right?

Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.

I have never been one to run when tragedy strikes.

Watching an entrepreneur fail is sad, but watching him fail from lack of nerve is tragic.

The characters I've played that I like the most are people that have a lot of obstacles. They have a lot of bad things going on. They're seeking to do something good amidst all the detritus around them, and they're aware of how badly they've screwed it up. That kind of self-awareness is tragic.

We were making 'Tragic Kingdom,' and we were kind of battling with the record company. It was just being drawn-out, in the same kind of situation where we were all working, we all had jobs, we were going to school.