Quotes About Adversity

'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'

I'd hate to have to leave music, but if I got stuck some place, I would.

I was 24 years old and stuck in a strange place with two boisterous little boys, and my husband was working offshore on the oil rigs. It was a life for which I wasn't prepared.

I don't care about the critics. I took a lot of nonsense. I got stuck with silly labels like 'White Hope.' What about other guys like Tex Cobb - they never had those labels?

Around 2008 when the writers' strike happened, all my stuff was getting stuck in development, and I thought, 'I'm going to try my hand at horror because I always loved it as a kid.'

I'm stuck with being No. 32 for the Cleveland Browns. I can't do anything about that, and I don't' want to do anything about it.

What's crucial is to never get stuck. Making hard decisions is such an important part of being a startup in order to keep moving forward.

As a fan, I hated most of 'The Day After Tomorrow' movie except for the part where Emmy Rossum and Jake Gyllenhaal were stuck in the library, and I thought, 'Oh, I like this now.' There's something about bringing people together in odd circumstances and exploring the petri dish of what happens.

In February 1991, I was rushed to the hospital in Los Angeles to have my feet amputated. Three years earlier, I had broken the national 100 meters hurdles record while a student at UCLA and was a favourite for the event at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

One thing that improved my cooking skills was being a poor student in California... If you don't have much money, you have to learn to cook.

I didn't know anything about acting, I didn't know anything about theater, but I was just an exceptional student at high school. I wanted to play ball; I'm going after a basketball scholarship and be a doctor. I got injured and my marks began to drop.

As a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty. I studied by candlelight.

I don't think I've had any adversity. I mean, yeah, I studied hard in school, but that's not adversity. Everyone in the Nuba Mountains has faced incredible adversity, every single one of them. Just to finish primary school is an incredible challenge.

I studied and grew as a man so that the situation of being wrongly accused wouldn't define me.

After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.

I think we have to bottom out. When the studios jump out of the ring, perhaps the artist can get back in.

When you're not in studios, you don't have any luxuries; you can't control the elements, so you have to put up with those extremes.

No study is possible on the battlefield.

I wanted to study painting and become a painter, but I had a huge flip-over in my life when I was about 18 or 19. I was part of a criminal environment; I got arrested and convicted, and I had to start thinking in a new way.

When I was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse, I would overdraft my bank account and not have enough money to buy groceries. But I also discovered how to cook with very limited resources.

Just because a company falls doesn't invalidate what we can learn by studying that company when it was at its historical best.

I lost my childhood. When girls of my age were studying and playing, I was married off.

My mother died when I was very young. I didn't want to be in the position I was in, but I eventually pulled my head out of the sand, started listening to people, and decided to use my role for good. I am now fired up and energized and love charity stuff, meeting people, and making them laugh.

Reflecting back, we all make mistakes; we all go through our stuff - relationships, financial, all kinds of stuff - and if you can grow from that and pass that message on, it's a pretty cool thing.