Quotes About Persistence

If you work really hard at something for a really, really long time, you do it well. Eventually, somebody will notice.

I did six Broadway shows, and I noticed there weren't many female comedians. When I went to a dancing audition, there were 1,000 girls. And there were three jobs. So I said I'll just try comedy. And I loved it.

Earlier in the shorter format, I was not consistent, so I was not getting noticed. But I always believed that I had the game to do it. It was just about consistency.

It was important for me as a theater artist to allow myself and my interests to evolve over time and allow my notion of what success meant to evolve over time. I've always had a day job and never been just acting. But it didn't make me feel like I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.

People didn't understand my passion. I dreamt big. I saw myself playing at Notre Dame. I saw myself in a classroom.

If you do a certain amount of work every day, it will eventually become a novel.

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.

My first novel took 12 years to complete because life got in my way.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I've never abandoned the novel.

I was one of those kids who never wanted to be anything but a novelist. And I don't know a lot of people who truly live the life that they dreamed of.

Why does any novelist keep writing long after they've made money? Because they've failed to write the perfect novel.

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.

I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I'd find to screw it up.

You hear about people who write 15 to 20 novels. How do they do it? You just gotta do it.

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

It is obviously always nice to start in a strong way, but it's also very important to keep that strength during the year - the season is quite long, from March to November.

A win in November is as important as a win in May.

So March 2010, we launched Pinterest, and we were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't started building Pinterest actually in November 2009. And that alone wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't left my job to start a company in May 2008.

Of course everyone has those moments of frustration now and then, when you say, 'I wish I could play well already - or just stop.' But it's too much trouble to stop just for a moment of frustration. It is when you keep going that you make the most progress.