Quotes About Persistence

I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.

I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.

With every project I've ever done, I've always treated it like I'm still in school. Each time you try to go a little further, get a little deeper, feel a little more, sculpt it a little better.

We once thought of cancer as an incurable disease; then we started treating it.

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.

When I'm sitting in my hotel room, I'm reading. If I've got some time after class, I'm reading. If I can get away with it while I'm doing treatment, I'm reading.

I work very hard; I have every day since I started my business, even when I was on bed rest during pregnancies, even when I was dealing with a cancer diagnosis and treatment.

When an actor even after ten years of experience puts in effort and treats every day of her work as the first day in her career, she becomes an asset.

If you go to a tree with an ax and take five whacks at the tree every day, it doesn't matter if it's an oak or a redwood; eventually the tree has to fall down.

I originally got into this because of a five-year-old's begrudgery of his teacher. Mrs. Lawlor cast me as a tree, and I was disgusted. I was sure I had more to offer than that. It was like, 'OK, if you want me to be set dressing, fine, I'll take it on the chin but I'll show you - I'm going to be a big actor some day.'

Success is carved out of a hard tree. It doesn't just happen. It's people who stick to it that succeed.

I hope to get the general public listening, the ones curious to see the woman who sat in the tree for two years.

You can only fall so far through a tree before the limbs become abrasive to your body.

No one can reap the fruit before planting the trees.

I started doing '30 Rock' and started writing 'Mystery Team' at the beginning of that. While I was doing 'Mystery Team,' I started practicing stand-up. While I was doing stand up, I got 'Community.' It's like I planted trees six years ago, and now they have fruit.

Sometimes I have to shake my head at how much work it can take to track down a handful of food. Perfect example: I spent a whole day in the Amazon rainforest, in Ecuador, scouring the trunks of dead palm trees for grubs.

I get inspired when I look at Tom Lennon, who did 'Reno 911!' for six seasons while writing huge movies and directing and also doing other pilots; he did that FX pilot, the 'Star Trek' thing.

I'm still a 'Star Trek' fan. You never stop being one.

The key to my perseverance was absolutely loving the craft of acting. I just figured that if I kept doing it, at the very least I would get better at acting. Even if I didn't become a tremendous success, as long as I knew I was improving and getting better, to me, that was success.

The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

Ever since 'Demon's Souls,' I've really been pursuing making games that give players a sense of accomplishment by overcoming tremendous odds.

The dissolution of the Party - we will not let such a tremendous, big, and glorious party be so easily crashed: this would then be the moment, when we would begin to fight on all fronts.

I know a lot of people who have tremendous commercial success and they go directly for it. There's something that has always been difficult about that for me.

Chris, boy, was he ever resilient, and was he ever someone who would never give up and had tremendous discipline, and he set goals and met them.