Quotes About Persistence

Failing is part of my process. A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb 7 times to make it good. So I tweak it.

Other people try and tweak their techniques and that, but I've just been exactly the same all my life, and I'd never change anything.

My toughest criticism usually comes from myself. As my editor can attest to, I'm never done tweaking a book until the production department has to rip it from my hands!

There was this song I was working on called 'Swing.' It was almost finished, but there was something missing, and I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. And then this little piece of information - this little tweet - came to the forefront of my mind.

I draft tweets, like, 20 times.

You know, my first album, some of those jokes I'd done for twelve years because I couldn't throw 'em out.

My advice to someone to follow in my footsteps is to have patience. I've been doing this for twelve years.

It's very difficult to play opposite nothing. I did it for, like, six years - I ran from an invisible smoke monster for most of my twenties.

I do try to deliver a solid first draft, meaning it's my tenth or twentieth draft and then I call it 'first' and hand it in, much to the chagrin of the studio sometimes when they look at the contract and go, 'You've passed your deadline.'

'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'

I started writing one afternoon when I was twenty, and ever since then I have written every day. At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my identity, and I did it without thinking.

I'm going to end up making twenty films if people let me.

Twenty years later, twenty years after I joined the women's movement, we're still talking about the same issues. We're still talking about reproductive rights for women, and we're still talking about getting equal pay for women. And that's just frustrating.

It took me about eight years to put together the program that I have been living for twenty years.

I practiced for at least two hours every day for twenty years, before then I practiced maybe four to five hours a day, and before then 14 hours a day. It was all I had ever done.

It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.

I don't know if people realize how hard I work, because sometimes people ask me for my secret. The truth is that I don't have any secrets apart from the fact that I've been directing theater and film for twenty years and trying at every stage to make my work better.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

To make a film is eighteen months of your life. It's seven days a week. It's twenty hours a day.

A lot of dudes have success, overnight success or one-year success but not many have ten, fifteen, twenty in this game so when you can do that is when I look up to you.

A lack of resources may slow you down, but don't let it make you throw away a big idea. Give God five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, twenty-five years, thirty years, forty years, or more. Give God all the time He needs to bring the resources to you!

One's dream is constantly evolving, rising and falling, changing course. This happens in every job, but because I have worked in comedy for twenty-five years, I can probably speak best about my own profession.

I have been hunted for twenty-one years. I have literally lived in the saddle. I have never known a day of perfect peace.

You can't make a souffle rise twice.