Quotes About Determination

I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn't. I have drawers full of - or I did have - drawers full of rejection slips.

Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

I had an agent who spent eight years - eight years! - trying to sell my stories. She sold other people's work; she just didn't sell mine.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

I've worked in construction, in a factory sewing clothes. I also sold flowers and doughnuts - just odd jobs to try to make 10 pesos, which is equivalent to 20 cents.

I've had business sense since I was very young. I sold chicken eggs when I was six.

I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.

There was a time, after I earned my graduate degree and before I sold my first novel, when it looked like I might have to get an office job.

I was a single mother, and my boys were babies. I sold my body for food, money, and Pampers.

I did 'I'd Do Anything,' and then a play and then 'A Little Light Music.' I played jazz in a night club where nobody listened to me for two years. I sold cereal in a market for a while. I worked in a clothes shop in Brixton. But that's the life of an actor. You never really know when your next job is coming.

In our early days, being recognized on any list of great companies was hard to imagine. There were times when we sold the office furniture to make payroll.

When I was being sold into marriage, it was hard to see a future for myself.

At age 15, I sold a television series to NBC.

When I was a young boy I sold newspapers by the side of the road. I cleaned the shoes of people for less than a pound a time. I was 12 years old but I had to do it to eat because my family was so poor.

My father, Rodolfo, worked as a train conductor and that's how we came to live in the railway car. The Government owned it, and we paid rent on it. Back then I would wake up at 4 in the morning and run through the streets, selling newspapers. I'd scream out, 'Sol, Debate, Noreste.' Those were the papers I sold.

You have to remember that Shadow and Bone' was the first book I sold. And it was, in fact, the first book I ever finished writing, despite many attempts before that to finish a novel. And when I was writing it, I didn't know if anybody was going to buy one book, let alone all three.

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

Self-denial and self-discipline, however, will be recognized as the outstanding qualities of a good soldier.

Just because I was almost 62, I did not feel decrepit and felt I wasn't finished being a soldier yet.

I come from the slums; I come from a hard background; I come from a poor family; and I was a soldier.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

The scene was not a happy one yet we looked upon it in the cold stoical spirit of a soldier; a slight chilling pang and then a return soul and body to the enemy before us.