Quotes About Persistence

When I wrote the opera, I made a deal with myself that for at least an hour a day I would work on it, even if it meant just sitting on my piano bench, staring into space and thinking about it. It's about keeping it regular, like your bowel movements - let's get real: it's your bodily artistic movements! It comes from the same place.

We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars.

There are plenty of people in the world who have tried to be rock stars and have not gotten there.

Everybody - even huge movie stars - have downs. That's just how it is. The work ebbs and flows. My manager and I were saying, 'Let's remember that in 2013 we were soooo busy.' So whenever it is that we're not, maybe it'll come back again. Maybe it won't. But you've gotta love the ride.

It ain't how you start out, it's how you finish.

I've got to pick myself up Dust myself off And start all over again.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

It's a heavy burden to look up at the mountain and want to start the climb.

You never start out being a star.

Like many start-up stories, mine has been rocky.

Any kind of business or start-up you have, you're going to be faced with a lot of people who maybe don't believe in it or see the vision or just say no. The key is seeing beyond that and really trying to not let the no's get you down.

I can't promise you will succeed if you stick with your start-up. What I can promise is that if you give up, you won't possibly succeed.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.

However, don't let perfectionism become an excuse for never getting started.

I'm a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the 'Enron' film.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.

I actually started acting because I couldn't dance.

I've been acting for a long time - I started when I was 12.

I started going to the open mics every day in 2003. You make the comics laugh, they get you work, and you build up your reputation. It was a slow process.

Finishing what you started is important.

I saw Damien Rice in Dublin when I was 13, and that inspired me to want to pursue being a songwriter... I practised relentlessly and started recording my own EPs. At 16, I moved to London and played any gigs I could, selling CDs from my rucksack to fund recording the next, and it snowballed from there.

When I started 'This American Life', one of the reactions I got was, 'When is the adult going to show up who will host the show?' At some point, people just got used to it.