Quotes About Persistence

So I've learned in the past, if a company approaches me and they want something like this, or something like that that I've done and I turn them down, they're going to do it anyhow.

I've seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining.

I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

Never take no for answer, and try to make films that turn you on.

You can't show up at the bedside and then turn on your skills. You have to keep your game sharp all the time.

So long as the opposing forces are at the outset approximately equal in numbers and moral and there are no flanks to turn, a long struggle for supremacy is inevitable.

If you're writing, it means getting up and writing all day, and if you're filming, it's getting up and filming all day. I get up, go to my computer, write, turn it off, and go to bed. That is a Clarkson day.

Just go and keep auditioning and keep trying and keep believing things will turn around, and it always does.

In Afghanistan and Iraq we would often get cowardly fire and rounds hitting us from the sides but we just hunker down and keep going, we don't turn the mission around.

Throughout my career, the pounding in my heart, the fright, has been ever-present, but I never turned back. Fear can be a highly motivational part of the journey.

Every successful career I've ever known was filled with long periods of meandering, months or even years when no one knew what would happen next. Look at me: I started as a geology major turned failed realtor.

My first book was rejected nine times. It turned out to be a best seller, Battle Cry? in 1953.

Early on with Squeeze, we played the Hope & Anchor with U2. Three people turned up. Then two left. Then the last person left. That's the least-attended show I've ever done.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I'm not confident there will be any takers.

When I was 19, 20 I faced rejections. When I turned 20 I signed my south film and by the time I was 23, I had done three south films. I would go to different production houses everyday for auditions and they would reject me saying you cant talk, smile, dance or act.

Bantam Press. And they commissioned me to write it. And when that was completed, they sold it to Harper and Row. And then I put it out to every movie studio in town. And they all turned it down.

Seemed like everything I tried to do in broadcasting and as a player before that turned out successfully. I was succeeding. I got to the top of the heap in every facet of broadcasting.

I've never met a successful person in any walk of life - from Michael Dell to Peyton Manning to Barack Obama - that when you ask that person, 'Hey, how did you get here, and what was your road like?' They say, 'You know what? It was really easy. I slept in all the time, turned my papers in late, didn't pay attention to people and my surroundings.'

'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' which my father had tried to get made for six, seven years, and I for four, was turned down by every studio. Every studio in the world had passed on it.

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

I turned down 'Cuckoo's Nest' four times before Jack got it.

I still get rejections - frequently - and my goal isn't to never fail, to never be turned down, but simply to succeed more often than I don't. And in order to do that, I have to constantly put myself out there, to judgment, critique, and rejection.

The bullying was hideous and relentless, and we turned it round by making ourselves celebrities.