Quotes About Persistence

Good stuff doesn't just happen. You have to fight for it.

When you think something's out of reach, you back off and say you didn't want it anyway.

flusher handle and all he managed to do was fall back and flush the stupid toilet.

About a year after 'Bosom Buddies,' I was suddenly a regular on 'Newhart,' and I was there almost seven years. And then, somewhere in the mid-1990s, I ended up doing a TV series version of 'Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.'

I'll come up with an idea for a character, and I'll write some jokes and make sure that that character is going to have some legs to it - that it's really going to work. If I can come up with jokes and material that I think will work, then I make a cheap version of the doll. Achmed started out just being this little plastic toy from the store.

The technical challenges were technical challenges that were not unbeatable; it was just that we had to learn how to do things and how to build a sensitive enough device. That took us 20 years after we built the first version of the LIGO detector.

When you make an animated film, you make it over and over and over. We almost do ten versions of the film.

I've had that recurring dream since I was a child, and a lot of people have different versions of that same dream, where you're running away from something, and it's going kind of slowly, but it's catching up with you, and it will not stop, and you cannot get away from it. Those dreams are manifested in different ways, but most people have them.

At Pixar, we do a million versions of the movie, and every one of them goes through their awkward teenage phase where it's terrible and doesn't make sense, and we just keep working on it.

'Paranormal Activity' had fifty versions because it was $250 to reshoot. We'd screen it, see one thing wrong, shoot for an hour, fix it, and then screen it again. You don't have to be disciplined about it. On a regular movie, you have to screen it and think of every problem, reshoot for three days and solve every problem, and then you're done.

To become the kind of person you want to become, you've got to have discipline. It's easier to keep to your standards 100 percent of the time versus 98 percent of the time.

Last year, at the beginning of the year, we couldn't get arrested, so I'll take this. Feast versus famine.

If you put out 20 films, you hope that a number are successful. It's like human reproduction versus frog reproduction. Frogs produce thousands and hope a few succeed. Humans don't produce many babies but put a lot of energy into them, which is kind of where we are. They still don't always succeed, but you try a lot harder.

When you're in a fighter jet and there's a dark layer of clouds with just one blue hole with the sun going through it, you shoot for that hole. You go vertical into the light, and suddenly, instead of gray and dark, it's light and blue. You are totally connected with the elements. You are in another world.

It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.

I am able to get up and dust myself off and keep moving forward. I'm very stubborn.

Frustration, although quite painful at times, is a very positive and essential part of success.

For me, there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don't look for an answer because I don't think there is one. I'm very glad to be the bearer of a question.

It's very corny, 'never give up' - but it's just a great quote that I always follow.

I've always been very determined. I don't get easily discouraged.

The very important thing you should have is patience.

I have found it advisable not to give too much heed to what people say when I am trying to accomplish something of consequence. Invariably they proclaim it can't be done. I deem that the very best time to make the effort.

I am not lost. I am very much alive.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.