William James Quotes

If you do a certain amount of work every day, it will eventually become a novel.

I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."

If you sit on the doorstep long enough, I daresay you will think of something

It seems like movies normally take a long time to get made. When you focus on it, and you're waiting for something, it seems to take longer.

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.

No matter how long you spend at creation, you're always a student.

Everything has an end, if only you live long enough to see it.

Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.

It takes us a long time to write a song that we all really like, so it makes sense that it would take a while for the listener to get there, too.

One of the marvelous things about film is that if you expose it long enough you're going to get a picture.

No matter how long your journey appears to be, there is never more than this: one step, one breath, one moment... Now.

I like making comics and animation because it takes such a long time. I'm not a runner of the 100 meter. I like marathons. The longer it takes, the better I feel.

He loved her for almost everything she was & she decided that was enough to let him stay for a very long time.

The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.

We were always in the shadows of the stuff that was getting more attention. So people learned to listen to us slowly over time. And, frankly, we learned how to listen to ourselves. It takes us a long time to write a song that we all really like, so it makes sense that it would take a while for the listener to get there, too.

[On her collaboration with Adolph Green:] We stare at each other. We meet, whether or not we have a project, just to keep up a continuity of working. There are long periods when nothing happens, and it's just boring and disheartening. But we have a theory that nothing's wasted, even those long days of staring at one another. You sort of have to believe that, don't you? That you had to go through all that to get to the day when something did happen.

Before something great happens, everything falls apart. Just hold on long enough to get through the smoke screen.

Think about how long it took for the mountains to get there and look so beautiful. Think about how long it takes for this tree over us to grow. We're so impatient. Think about it. This leaf here took forever to become that perfect leaf. We're that. We're work in progress. That's actually being alive.

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.

I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts.

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.

Sometimes great stuff comes quickly and sometimes it doesn't and you've got to dig in for the long haul, don't loose heart, and wait for something to come along. Which is something you learn the more you do it, that if it isn't coming straight away just hang in there and something will come.

And so not only do you have to make that work, you can't really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you're waiting months and months and months before you can see if it's going to be working emotionally.

Life will teach you, but you have to live long enough to get those lessons.