Quotes About Persistence

As long as a character doesn't die, the character can always come back.

I am kind of like a diesel. It is the cyclist in me.

I'm a bit like a diesel engine, you know.

No crash diets work. I have tried everything, believe me.

My friends and I have always been trying to make movies, at every moment. We've tried so many different angles and approaches. But when it happens, it happens, and you just run with it.

I started by looking at what others had done before me. You see, over the years there have been attempts by many different people to reconstruct the chariot.

As far as getting my start, it was really Norman Lear, even aside from being on 'All in the Family.' He helped me get my start as a director. He was the one who said, 'Let him do 'Spinal Tap.' Let him give it a try,' because I had been trying for years to get that thing off the ground.

I'm going to continue to tap until I can't move.

If I see an audition for a show or a movie, I'll send a tape in. I attack it. The whole time, I'm booking comedy, so no matter what, I always got that coming in. I'm always working on my craft.

Every once in a while, someone will mail me a single popcorn kernel that didn't pop. I'll get out a fresh kernel, tape it to a piece of paper and mail it back to them.

I don't take any shorts. I don't say, 'Okay, it's good enough.' I try to get exactly what I'm hearing in my head to the tape, and I won't let it move until then.

I had actually sent an audition tape for Simon Pegg's movie 'Hot Fuzz,' which came to nothing. Four years after the film released, out of nowhere, I got a call saying the producers of 'Game of Thrones' wanted me to play Hodor after they had seen that particular tape.

I usually tape about 99 percent of my auditions at my house. I have a camera and record myself, and my mom reads the other lines off-camera. Then I send it to my agent and manager, and they send it to the casting director, and we see how it goes from there.

My friend gave me a VHS tape of Eddie Murphy's 'Raw.' I watched it so many times, I fell in love with it. I would watch it every day, just picking it apart. And then I started doing open mics around Maryland and D.C.: that's where I'm from. And I haven't stopped since.

I love watching game tape. I can do it all day long and enjoy every minute of it.

If you ask somebody who played basketball against me in the first grade and you watch a tape, it's been with me since I was a kid. I've always had this mentality to go out there and defend.

When I think of a song, I think of it as a beast. You chase these beasts around the room and try to grab them and put them in a tape machine. But they're slippery, and they run away a lot.

Getting through these camps, sometimes you're held together with paper clips and bubble gum and tape. You just kind of get in there and you make it work because if you pull out of a fight, you don't get paid.

As soon as I came to L.A., things immediately shifted for me. I was now actually here with the people who were making the decisions; I wasn't out in New York sending in tapes to L.A.

At this point, I've really failed at a lot of things. It's nice to be able to say that, in a way. I've failed at music. I've failed at dance. And acting - there have been times when I went out and read lines to audition for acting parts. I believe that if anybody wrangled together those audition tapes, it would be pretty hysterically funny.

I'd been trying to do this since I was 15, sending out the demo tapes and doing all the things that everyone told me that I should be doing. But no deal - like, never.

I had sent out 100 audition tapes within 365 days, and then I got the 'Dope' audition. When I sent that out, two days later my manager called me and said they wanted to fly me out to L.A. to audition.

At about 17, I decided I wanted to take kiteboarding seriously and compete, so my agents were like, 'Just keep sending in a few audition tapes anyway, just for good stuff.'

Whenever I didn't have a job, I studied acting, I sent out tapes, went on auditions.