Quotes About Persistence

Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

The way I work] is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. (The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101)

For a moment he thought the chair was aligned, but then he decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair.

It's like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way

The only hope we have is that we can pay off on our failures

You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

During her lifetime Eleanor of Aquitaine had not been a patient woman. While she had lived, she had learned to bide her time, but biding one's time is a very different thing from patience.

If you really want to be a witch, nothing you have to do will seem like too much. If you don't really want to be a witch, everything will seem like too much.

They waited for miles and miles of time

First you burrow. Then you beg.

What could be more heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of all forms? And yet some rocks undergo a change in their molecular structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light. Some carbons, under inconceivable heat and pressure, turn into diamonds, and some heavy minerals into other precious stones.

purse, was steady.

I believe that, with anything in life, if you have the patience, desire and passion, you can do whatever you set your mind to.

The famous last line of Herzog's book is "There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.

It reminds me of a very wise saying about mountaineering that my wife, Paula, repeats often: "Just when you think you've got it figured out, you don't.

Stamina is the big thing you have to learn if you want to achieve success in any kind of career, but especially creative careers.

But stinging nettles: They just love existing, don't they? They're bastards. Stinging nettles are the Nazis of the weed world.

You stick a wooden stake through the heart of your failures and they become successes.

To me there always seems a way to gain the opposite side of an obstacle. If one cannot pass over it, or below it, or around it, why then there is but a single alternative left, and that is to pass through it.

I shall have to believe even though I cannot understand

To me there always seems a way to gain the opposite side of an obstacle. If one cannot pass over it, or below it, or around it, why then there is but a single alternative left, and that is to pass through it. I could

What they accomplished, Alice, with instruments and weapons of stone and bone, surely that may we accomplish also.

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

THREE days crawled slowly out of the east and followed one another across the steaming jungle and over the edge of the world beyond.