Quotes About Persistence

If I have a golden touch, I'd also say that I have the opposite of whatever a golden touch is, because I've had a lot of things fail. I think part of the experience of being successful is that you have to have a lot of stuff not work.

No force, oppression, imprisonment, jail... nothing will stop me.

I'd like to be the next Oprah financially, but I'm not a TV actor. I'm not someone with an entertainment background, I'm a cop. And I'm not afraid to go anywhere and get down and dirty.

I am full of optimism. The world hasn't beaten it out of me yet. And I'm going to work very hard to make sure that they don't.

I'm a serious optimist. I come from a country where you have little to be hopeful for, and so you have to always be an optimist.

I'm so optimistic, I'd go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take the tartar sauce with me.

I am still a very optimistic person. I continue to do work with joy.

Easy is not an option!

Giving up cannot be an option.

I started playing guitar, like, when I was 17 or so, but where I'm from, you just don't hear about people moving to Nashville and making it. It was such a foreign thing to me. I never knew music was an option for me.

Dialing down is not an option for me.

I could never even entertain the notion that it's an option, to not be an artist.

Failure was not an option for me.

You ain't got to wait on a cab no more; just call your Uber, and it pulls up. But waiting isn't an option: that's just a big part of life.

I love acting. I had a backup option in writing or direction. But I have gone on to become an actor.

I'm addicted to success, failure is not an option.

I don't really take no for an answer. Giving up isn't an option.

If you want to achieve something, you're going to run into roadblocks, but you have to learn how to pivot and explore your options.

At 15 I had moved out of my parents' place, and my options were looking pretty narrow. But I had this acting thing and I just wanted to be able to keep going because it was really good. That was all I wanted.

Anything I've done that really worked happened because, either by sheer will or a lack of options, I was incredibly focused on one problem.

Honestly, six months before getting 'Orange Is the New Black,' I remember telling my manager I was done.

I will never master this craft. Orchestras are very, very forthcoming with me.

When I came to New York, I told everyone I was a writer/director, and they said, 'No.' There was a rule. You could be one or the other. They ordained me writer. But then I won the Obie for directing 'Spunk,' and the rules changed.

That's what keeps me going: dreaming, inventing, then hoping and dreaming some more in order to keep dreaming.