Quotes About Persistence

Crashing is never funny, but sometimes you can jump up, laugh at your stupidity, and go, 'What the hell was that?'

I will always have a stutter.

Sometimes you have to stutter step; sometimes you have to spin inside. You have to run some games.

But now I've been in the arena for 47 years and I stutter less today than I did in those days.

To me, style is consistency.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it.

Don't have a favorite subject, I think I want to carry on doing this because I really enjoy it.

I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.

I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it.

I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at it.

I really love picking up subjects where people say, 'How is this going to work?' and trying to find a way to make it work because every story needs to be told.

The fashion world doesn't know the word 'stop,' so you have to make sure there are sublime moments every day.

When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.

When I was 20, I wrote a film on spec and sent it to the BBC. They wrote back, 'Usually, when we reject submissions, we like to offer some encouragement, but in your case, we don't see any point in you continuing.' I took it as encouragement anyway, thinking that only people who write terrible things are capable of writing great things.

I've always been a good submission grappler, but I've still evolved, upped my skills and I continue to get better every day.

Always I try one submission. If it doesn't work, the second one works.

Every project that you write about or read about, it goes through years of hard work. We write a screenplay; we design. Then you submit those and the budget, and it's out of your hands.

For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.

I was the second guy to submit Jim Miller, so I'm up there in catching guys that have been deemed uncatchable.

I subscribe to the slow nickel theory. You take a little bit at a time. You always make better of what you have when you don't have best.

I have said many times I don't want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That's not who I am. I devoted the subsequent 50 years - more - to writing.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

Before I was attacked, I would write about the future - just goals, lists and plans. I'd scribble without depth or substance about the things I wanted to do with my life, whether short or long-term, and how I thought my future would be: a successful career in TV and modelling, marriage, a family.