Quotes About Persistence

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

In my game, you get brokenhearted a bit. You do a play, get a bad review in the papers... actors are sensitive; you think of all the work you've done, and it breaks your heart, but you learn to shrug it off and to carry on.

TV is an interesting business. You audition with a couple of little papers in your hand, and if you're lucky, you get to say those lines in the show. Then, once in a while, you get to do more.

There are innumerable television channels and papers, all very aggressive and not willing to take no for an answer.

Most of the stuff I've written has never even gotten made. It's par for the course. It's a great living, but it also gets very frustrating.

I didn't have a parade of teams wanting to sign me, that's for sure.

And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

I'm deeply impatient. If I can't park directly in front of somewhere, I go home.

I used to put flyers on cars in parking lots, anything to get people to come to my shows. I was always having to think outside the box, and even to this day, I still try and come up with creative ways to market my shows.

Struggle has been a part and parcel of my life.

It's very hard to motivate yourself and others with only one goal - particularly if it's complex and you might not get there until years down the road. That's why intermediate goals are so important.

Even though some of the films I've made haven't been particularly commercial, I don't find them failures.

When I think about it, I was working very hard the summer before I applied to graduate school. I was going to the library every day in the summer. I read a play a day for about three months. I was taking audition classes, and I was reciting lines to myself and acting as my own scene partner. But I was having fun.

Well, the idea is that failure is an inevitable partner on the road to success and, if you're not willing to confront failure, you can never find out how good you are.

I have great people around me, I have great training partners, and I think if you really want something you work for it and you get it.

I try to cover myself, to have another movie under way before the last one comes out. I've been able to just scrape by, holding out for good parts instead of taking anything.

Most good work is a combination of parts you love and parts you could do better. My constant mantra is, 'Next time, next time, next time.'

The good parts are the people who don't make do. They're the interesting people. Lear doesn't make do.

I've been trying to play old-lady parts since I was in my 20s, so I look forward to all of that.

I don't see myself as competing with other actresses. I mean, I went through a time when I was in New York, and I was going to lots of auditions and trying to get parts, but even then, you're not really competing with the other actresses. There is a competition going on, but it's not like something you can win in that way.

Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.