Quotes About Persistence

I auditioned for 'American Idol' at 17. They told me, 'No.'

If my idol Mahatma Gandhi could fight to eradicate corruption at the age of 78, why can't I try at 60?

I would work every day if I could.

I really wasn't even sure if I should continue acting. I would like try and figure out if I could be good enough to do it. It was like 10 or 12 years into my career before I felt like maybe I can do it. It was such a different time than now.

I'd like to do the young cadet thing again for sure, but that's why I wanted to do this, to see if I could do it. I took the scenes out of the script and put them together and read them as one little arc, story and that seemed to work.

Being in this industry is so crazy that I don't even know if I could be in it if I didn't have faith. You have to have some level of it to want to keep doing this. Everyone who's been in this long enough has some sort of practice.

I don't think when I decided I didn't want to be an accountant any more that I was necessarily saying I wanted to be an NBA head coach. I just really wanted to figure out if I could do it.

If I could read it, I could play it.

If I could still play, I would be trying. It's been 15 years.

If I could play this game at a decent level, I'd come back and play.

If I could be working every day, I would be.

I didn't know if I could act, but I knew I could be a great ballet dancer, and Balanchine put out the carpet for me.

I was so hungry when I started attempting acting. Not even to be a professional. Just to find out if I could act.

I found myself in this conundrum of loving acting, but not liking the path that you have to take to do it. I was just never good at auditioning, so basically I decided I would just write my own stuff and if I could get a role in it, then fine.

I never thought that I couldn't do what I set out to do. It wasn't from arrogance; it was from ignorance.

Everyone knows the more you chase something the faster it runs and the more you ignore something the faster it comes.

You can't run away from the fact that you cannot ignore hard work.

As anyone who has tinnitus knows, it's not something that you can ignore, and you have to deal with it on a daily basis.

We all go through things in life. You try to stay positive, but you can't ignore bad things that happen. You just try to work through them.

My message is don't be discouraged by anything anybody tells you. In my case of the science thing, and I just ignored people who said, 'Oh, girls don't do that.'

If you're talented, you can't be ignored.

For me, the show must go on - it doesn't matter how ill you are, you get on and do it.

I'm not considered as illegitimate as I once was. Because in a sense, I'm like lip cancer - I'm not going to go away.

Once I faced the fact I was going to deal with illness for the rest of my life, I got on with what I really wanted to do.