Quotes About Persistence

When I'm concentrating, I can be fixed in place for hours. In fact, there was a joke in my office that everybody would come and chat outside my door because they knew - no matter how loud they talked - if I was concentrating, it would not disturb me at all.

The first guitar I ever had was a gut-string Spanish guitar, and I couldn't really get the hang of it. I was only 13, and I talked my grandparents into buying it for me. I tried and tried and tried, but got nowhere with it.

I'm not really gonna stop. We've got so much stuff to do, so many songs we talked about, so many things to record.

I wanted to design a line based on Hollywood's Golden Era. I talked with Stephen Burrows and with Willi Smith and with one or two other people, but it just seems like such a hard field to break into. I need someone like Calvin Klein's manager to get behind me!

I'm not a good talker, I'm a great talker because I do it so often over a long period of time.

There is a part of me that's oblivious. People always ask me, 'What obstacles have you faced?' and I always think, 'What are you talking about?' Whether or not there were obstacles, I never saw obstacles. It's never occurred to me that I wasn't good enough for something.

I'm only 5 ft. 7 in. tall, and for modelling, that's small, so I wasn't getting signed, but I kept on pushing.

I'm still standing up there tall and strong every night that I perform.

If I was blond and tall, then I would have had 10 times the competition. I auditioned steadily and performed for everyone who would hire me. Now I am in a position to pick and choose my roles.

I decided to take a stab at acting. I entered the American Academy of Dramatic Art, where one teacher told me I'd never make it - I was too tall.

An actor's life is all about rejection. It's you they don't want; it's you who's too tall or too short or too fat. With stand-up, it doesn't matter what you look like.

It doesn't matter how tall you are. You have to carve out space and hold your ground.

You have no control over how tall you are or how long your legs are, but you do have control over how much you concentrate.

Even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.

I chewed up a lot of Florida highway when I was starting out. Used to come to Tampa two or three times a year for about 10 years straight.

We've brought championships to Tampa and we've had successes elsewhere. But one thing that drives us day in and day out is we have one Super Bowl ring but we've got many more fingers.

When I was growing up, I was really into comedy. I listened to a lot of comedy albums. I loved Richard Pryor, but the comic that had the most impact on me was always my brother Chris, who was in the next room. It was tangible. If Chris could make it, I could try.

You just can't take a crash course to be a tango dancer in a movie.

When you still have something in the tank, it's really hard to let it go.

You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

The car that brought you here still runs.

We may be able to begin tennis instruction or piano lessons by dint of will, but we will not keep at them for long without joy. In fact, the only reason we can begin is because we know that joy is the end result. That is what sustains all novices; they know there is a sense of pleasure, enjoyment, joy in mastery.

As Thomas Merton says, "We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!"2 Psalm

you should not allow yourself to be convinced by repeated failures,