Quotes About Persistence

For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.

Everyone starts out desperately trying to make a hit, but some people are just more mistake-prone than others. I happened to be fairly mistake-prone. Of the 40 shows I made, I'd say ten were hits, which is a pretty good average.

My day starts at 4:30 A.M., and I sort of have two speeds: fast and stop.

I can't sculpt. But if I were a sculptor, as you start to get something that actually looks like what you want, then it starts to be fun. That's the way I find writing.

The reality of a startup is you have failures very often.

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

If you have a startup that's keeping it up at night because you think it's so great, then you should do that.

Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.

Startup stories are always smoother in the telling than they are in reality. A startup is not one, but a series of 'Aha!' moments, and some which seem like 'Aha!' moments but turn out not to be.

In a startup, there have to be challenges. Otherwise, someone else would have done it already. And that's almost the most exciting part.

I'm very, very used to hearing no - repeatedly! - and through my experience founding startups, I've learned to view those two little letters not as a final roadblock but as a problem to be solved.

Startups, in some sense, have gotten so easy to start that we are confusing two things. And what we are confusing, often, is, 'How far can you get in your first day of travel?' with, 'How long it is going to take to get up to the top of the mountain?'

Doing startups is all about making mistakes.

It's a common case with high-growth startups where the co-founding team breaks up - generally, it's hard to get the team to persist. It's easy to stick with it when you have known the person for decades either as a friend or family.

I'll never starve.

When I was about 12, I came home from middle school and told my parents I wanted to be an actor. My father didn't say it to me, but he told my mom, 'No. I'm not going to allow that. He'll starve to death.' I grew up in a small town in Illinois where being an actor was not something people did.

I am confident that as an artist, I will never starve to death.

When I moved from Boston to L.A., I floundered. I definitely did time at the Improv and the Comedy Store, making 20 bucks a night. I learned how to be a starving comic. I was an in-debt comic: I ate well on loan.

When I was playing bluegrass, I was living down in West Hollywood - starving.

I was a starving artist.

When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.

Satisfaction isn't a state that comes easily to me.

The principles upon which a safety lamp might be constructed I stated to several persons long before Sir Humphrey Davy came into this part of the country.

The Rhodes scholarship process was very extensive. I had to do several personal statements, rewrite those over and over and over again. I had to get some letters of recommendation.