Quotes About Effort

Nowadays, everyone writes a cookbook. Models, singers, whatever, everybody thinks that they can do it and cook on TV. What they don't understand is that if you want to do it well, you need to put in the hours.

I don't actually have to think very hard when I'm writing. I mean, there are times where it's a task, and you have to plug away and plug away. But then there are times when a song writes itself in 15 minutes, and you're just struggling to keep up with it.

You know, if an actor or, say, a basketball player writes a rhyme, it doesn't mean he's a rapper. You got to put in time. I don't say I'm an actor.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

I'm a poor artist. Through brute force, I brought myself up to mediocre. I've never taken a writing class, but I can write okay.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.

She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

It's the work that's important, not the individual who does it.

Yes, freedom is magnificent. But freedom is hard work.

Será que o diabo já se esforçou para ser bom de novo ou, se fizer isso, não é um demônio?

It's so easy to wish that we'd made an effort in the past, so that we'd happily be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort must be made, as it always is, that prospect is much less inviting.

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

To a truly remarkable extent, we're more likely to do something if it's convenient, and less likely if it's not. For this reason, we should pay close attention to the convenience of any activity we want to make into a habit.

By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished. We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year, by doing just a little bit each day.

Studies show that people tend to persevere longer with problems they've been told are difficult as opposed to easy.

We all know the secret of dieting...it's the application that's challenging. p 7

By doing a little bit each day you can get a lot accomplished