Quotes About Persistence

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

kau harus memperlakukan kegiatan menulismu sebagai sebuah karier. Kau tidak boleh membicarakannya. Kau harus melakukannya-ingin melakukannya, suka melakukannya walaupun harus kesepian, merasa bahwa di bumi tidak ada yang lebih penting ketika kau sedang melakukannya.

An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.

Why does a man spend fifty years of his life in an occupation that is often painful? I once told a class I was teaching that writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar in some respects to football. The effort required can be exhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt on almost every play; but that doesn't deprive a man or a boy from getting peculiar pleasures from the game.

Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.

You must keep sending work out you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Chase the vision regardless of what other people do, say, or think.

Movies take years to bring to theater, but hours to watch. Strikingly similar to success.

People get too big to do the little things and then wonder why they don't have the big results.

The questions that keep us up at night are the questions which drive us during the day.

To settle is to die. To not settle implies that death is avoidable.

A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub. (from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)

I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Reply upon being asked how he made his discoveries]

Yeah, sex is cool, but have you tried solving the brachistochrone problem in a single night?

Es gibt Dinge im Leben, um die man kämpfen muss, weil die Zeit, die dafür bleibt, manchmal kürzer ist, als wir glauben.

Let the world either kill us or grow accustomed to us; here we stand.

The previous night, she'd dragged herself

Possiamo fare solo quello che possiamo; ma questo dobbiamo farlo, nonostante le difficoltà.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.

Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.