Quotes About Persistence

Jeff Wachtel, who was the main reason our show came back, and also got picked up to begin with, is from the New York theater.

It comes easy to me to run. I picked a lot of it up from Germany. I had four-and-a-half years there, and I learned you have to be on the automatic button. Press it, and you go: you keep running, chasing and working.

I think I'm one of life's copers. And picking myself up and dusting myself off and starting all over again is one of my mottoes, actually.

While I was playing football in the U.S., I learnt to play the guitar, and I'm picking it up again now.

As an athlete, you sort of just win every day. Because you're going to sometimes lose every day. And so you just keep picking yourself up and going forward.

At the end of the day, not everyone's going to like what you do. There's always going to be that one person, or many people, who are going to keep on nagging at you and picking on every little thing that you do.

Everything in life is overcoming objectives. I don't care if you're picking up a woman in a bar or trying to jump a rocket over a river.

At certain times, you start to - maybe not lose the faith - but just wonder how long it will take until someone picks me up. I was thinking, 'Is it just me? Do I think I'm better than any manager does?'

My dad taught me very early in life that whenever a child learns to walk, he falls a lot of times, but then he picks himself up and learns to walk like a man, and that is something which is a motto in life as well. You gotta pick yourself up, and you gotta walk, and you gotta walk strong.

There aren't a lot of second chances for second-round picks.

I went undrafted, played summer league with the Heat. I got to training camp three weeks straight and I didn't make a shot, whether live or pickup, coach in the gym or not.

I feel like I've been picky through the years and would do one movie a year or one movie every two years, and I want to work a lot more. So if I can find something that just happens right away as a director, I'll do it if I really love it, but otherwise, I want to keep working as an actor and getting better.

If I am right about the big picture, I will be rewarded for my patience.

Everybody accuses me of moving fast when I direct a picture. I don't move fast, but I just keep moving.

My first audition was an open call and I had no picture and no resume - that's how clueless I was. I just thought I could show up.

I took individual photographs of Annie Liebovitz, I kept taking her picture.

I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.

Where I came from, the idea of going into show business was just ridiculous; in fact I didn't tell anybody because I knew people would laugh at me. So I sort of snuck around and got some pictures and got a resume together and, of course, lied and said I did all kinds of things I didn't do.

I think a few pictures at a time.

That is the godawful thing about television today. Performers don't have any place to hit and miss. You're either in or you're out; you don't have a chance to become good at your craft. If you make three pictures in a row and they don't go over, you're out of the business.

30 years and 55 pictures - not more than five that were any good, or any good for me.

'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.

Collaboration is all about rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and helping each other to constantly improve a piece. And, it's also about spurring each other on to doing really great, hard work - it's easier to do it in a collaboration than on your own.

Maybe you don't work for seven months a year, but you'll work again. It may be a piece of garbage, so you wear hip boots.