Quotes About Persistence

For Lennon and me, we grew up with Laverne and Shirley or Lucy and Ethel. For us, those are our inspirations. And I think Amy Poehler and Tina Fey led the way for us to be fearless in the way we kept shoving our message and our comedy voice down people's throats until they listened.

I forget who said it, but there's that saying: 'Films are never finished, they're abandoned.' There's always something you think you can improve on, but I don't think you should try. George Lucas started doing it, and didn't stop. You can tinker indefinitely, and it doesn't necessarily make it better.

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

'Humans of New York' did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up.

Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you've failed at something.

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was staying with a friend of a friend of a friend up in the Hollywood Hills. I was in this tiny little closest paying $400 a month in this beautiful house.

I think that if you keep banging at the door all you need is a little foothold, a little tiny foothold, and then the rest will take care of itself.

I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write. My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room.

Tiny steps will get you to your goal months and months sooner. A little is better than a lot.

Mum says that, since I was a tiny baby, I've had the most strong-willed and stubborn personality known to man. Although that was a real pain for her, she admired my resolve.

When I got out of school, I just started doing plays of the off-off-Broadway route, and for many years, that's what I did, slowly doing work in tiny theaters, building relationships with people in the business. It's not a showy story.

My first job in acting was in a Scott Baio movie called 'I Love N.Y.' My role was Italian Girl. I sent my 8x10 to a casting agent in the booklet, 'The Ross Report,' which is where all the agents were listed before that little thing called the Internet. I read for this tiny part. I couldn't have been more excited to get it.

I've always wanted to do it. I know a lot of people say that, but I really did want to make films, even when I was a tiny little kid.

Sometimes you've got to tip your cap when they're painting stuff on the corner. But you can't give up, got to keep battling and make some adjustments.

My tip is to work hard, be diligent and dedicated.

Sometimes it's hard to start, but once it gets going, once you reach the tipping point - usually between chapter seven and nine - then it's like hanging onto a large snowball as it hurtles downhill.

Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.

You must never tire fighting Satan.

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

Some of you may know my story: How for nineteen years, I worked as a manager for a tire plant in Alabama. And some of you may have lived a similar story: After nearly two decades of hard, proud work, I found out that I was making significantly less money than the men who were doing the same work as me.

I'll flip a stupid tire. But I ain't running.

Really, the measure of a man is when they're tired and exhausted.