Quotes About Adversity

I never made it to the school choir because the music teacher didn't like my voice. I was pretty sad. But he was probably right; I did have a voice a bit like a goat, but my dad told me to never give up and to keep going, and it's paid off.

I have dyslexia, and I never did learn to read music, and I even had a problem in reading because everything was turned upside down, so I just had to draw from the lyrics and the voice that I would hear in my mind.

I agree that my films have flopped, and I have been slammed for my nasal voice, my look, and my dialogue delivery. But every time I got a negative feedback, I went out of my way to work on it.

I went from buying my own condominium and a car for myself when I was 17 on 'The Facts of Life' to not being able to pay my rent. I was at the unemployment office all the time. I had to sell my record collection just to make ends meet. And then I started getting these voice-over jobs.

Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

Plus, I've always felt that, if the worst came to the worst in my career, I could always fall back to doing voices on the radio.

In 'Gravity,' nearly everything is a metaphor for the main character. The way I tend to approach a film is that character and background are equally important; one informs the other. Here, Sandra Bullock is caught between Earth and the void of the universe, just floating there in between. We use the debris as a metaphor for adversity.

My formative years would be in South Central Los Angeles. It was a really volatile environment, but, I always say, when you're living in the hood, you don't live this life where you're crying every day, downtrodden every day.

Volleyball was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

I was supposed to be too short to play college volleyball.

Everyone who's great - play any sport, tennis, basketball, football, volleyball, swimming, don't matter, everyone's failed. Everyone's gonna fail. It's how you bounce back.

Every job you have, there are days that are more difficult than others. I worked on a daytime soap opera, where the volume at which you're producing this medium is incredible.

When the going gets tough, the prospect of delegating half your responsibilities to a willing volunteer, either to play a supporting role or take over the breadwinning, certainly holds allure.

My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing.

'Il faut vivre' might almost be the French national motto from 1940 to June 1944, but who is to say ours would have been any different if the Germans had paraded victoriously through London and Generalfeldmarschall Von Runstedt made his headquarters at Claridge's?

I think when you've lost an election by 179, there's going to be a period of time after eighteen years in government when you can't do anything right, and people just kick you for the sake of it, will never admit they voted Conservative.

When you stand your ground, and you are attacked by liberals and attacked by the press, that is going to earn you the respect of voters.

Every time I got close, somebody seemed to play a little better.

I come up in a segregated 1943 atmosphere of segregation.

You can lose money, and you can lose all sorts of things, but you can't lose your self-confidence.

I don't have time for self-pity. I don't see the point in dwelling on the past.

My sense of humor has saved me more than a couple of times in my life.

I got sent off a few times in my life, but I never lost my head. I mistimed tackles, and I made mistakes.

My 12 years in Los Angeles were hell! But I was sent to study hell and to learn as much from it as I could because there is no other place like hell for a full and complete education.