Quotes About Persistence

I applied to Yale, and I got in.

I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.

My entire life, people have told me that I couldn't do certain things. They told me I couldn't go to college. They told me I couldn't go to Yale, Georgetown, couldn't end up doing much on Capitol Hill. Couldn't be party chair. And my response has always been, 'Watch me.'

I am a Yale Law School graduate.

Captain Huston and myself have spent over $200,000 in strengthening the Yankees since we purchased the club. We paid $37,500 for Frank Baker; we paid $25,000 for Lee Magee, and we have got rid of a young fortune on other players who couldn't deliver the goods. And we have had some of the most frightful luck I ever heard of.

Do not quit! Hundreds of times I have watched people throw in the towel at the one-yard line while someone else comes along and makes a fortune by just going that extra yard.

I started as a working pupil in a yard, mucking out and doing all the duties... and I just never gave up on my dream.

I was the kid who always liked to take the ball down to the school even in my free time, kick it against the wall, juggle it in the front yard and so it was kind of a perpetual state of playing soccer for me.

So along with that is spending a lot of time with the ball. For me it was, I loved to juggle the ball in my front yard, and I always challenged myself - how many juggles can I get today? I think for players to get better, it's just about spending the time.

I'd get to within a yard of that door you walk through and the thing would go mad. I used to carry an X-ray in my briefcase, to show them. But I had all the metal taken out.

The basketball coach cut me within two days, so I was back in the pool. I was the first one in the wall after the first 25 yards, but the last one out because I didn't have a flip turn.

Being a Diva in a man's world, you're constantly in an uphill battle; pitching ideas, trying to get TV time, trying to get in-ring time, the whole nine yards.

You don't work your butt off for 90 yards of a 100-yard dash and then just quit.

My first venture was to trade bicycle parts and hosiery yarn. The initial days proved to be difficult, and I earned very little from my business. But I kept at it. Each day, when I retired for the night, I told myself that money would come in the next day.

I was in 'Seussical,' and I was in a cage onstage in a purple yarn suit singing backup, and I was like: 'I've had it. I can't do this anymore.' I will say for the record that I did love the show, but I was like: 'I want to do something else. I need a little more.'

Every time you get told you get a part, it's just wonderfully soothing and incredibly fantastic and healing. You have a bad day at school, you come home and get told you've got a part in something, and it's just like, 'Yeah, it's all worth it'.

That still has to be there. And so, it's kind of an interesting question you brought up. Because, on the one hand, yeah, it'd be lovely. I certainly don't see that happening. In fact, I see the opposite happening.

I had a stormy graduate career, where every week we would have a shouting match. I kept doing deals where I would say, 'Okay, let me do neural nets for another six months, and I will prove to you they work.' At the end of the six months, I would say, 'Yeah, but I am almost there. Give me another six months.'

Yeah, I spent about 20 years in a dorm room. It took me a while to graduate.

If people ridicule you, look them in the eye and say, 'Yeah, I may have failed, but at least I tried,' and get on with it.

Yeah, I'd like to get the girl and at least make it through the film.

I can't tell you how many times I hit that mat, especially that first year, where I said to myself, 'Man, this fake stuff hurts like hell. Do I really want to do this?' And every time, I would come back, 'Yeah, I wanna do this.'

Writing, yeah. Me and my friend Scott Bloom just finished the first rough draft of a script. It's taken us three years to do, but we finally got a first draft. And we'll see whatever happens with that.

I'm a lifer, yeah... I can honestly say I'm a lifer.