Long-Term Effort Quotes

Nothing great comes into being all at once.

My dad told me, 'It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success', and it took me seventeen and a half years.

Not art and science only, but patience will be required for the work.

If you do something enough with purpose long enough, you're eventually going to get really good at it.

Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.

Becoming an actor is like becoming a father. It's not hard to become one. Making a life of it is the challenge.

There are no shortcuts to building a team each season. You build the foundation brick by brick.

Courage changes things for the better...[With courage you can] stay with something long enough to succeed at it, realizing that it usually takes two, three or four times as long to succeed as you thought or hoped.

Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.

It's perseverance that's the key. It's persevering for long enough to achieve your potential.

It's so funny looking back, but my so-called overnight success actually took 15 years. I remember when I didn't have any money, and my only car was mom's Hyundai.

I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.

It's been a long haul. It may seem to some people that have never heard of me, 'Oh she just popped up on the scene,' but I've been working on this for some time.

It takes time, it's a grind. There are no shortcuts. You've got to grind and grind.

Hyperloop is a decades-long effort. You're moving steel and reshaping physical things, so you need government to help you build.

I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years.

The longer it takes you to become successful, the harder it will be for somebody else to take it away from you.

I mean, it's not just one day you get up, bang, and you got Osama bin Laden. It's the kind of thing where an awful lot of people over a long period of time - thousands have worked this case and these issues and followed on the leads and captured bad guys and interrogated them and so-forth.

The secret of getting on the shortlist is doing your best work fearlessly for a long time before you get on the list.

I've been playing music for over 20 years now. I started playing when I was 14 years old. To everyone who has said I was an overnight success... where have you been the last 20 years?

Patient perseverance in well doing is infinitely harder than a sudden and impulsive self-sacrifice.

It took a long time to get to the place in my career where I could pick and choose what I wanted to do.

The pursuit of peace resembles the building of a great cathedral. It is the work of a generation. In concept it requires a mater-architect; in execution, the labors of many.

A man will work and slave in obscurity for ten years and then become famous in ten minutes.

No great thing happens suddenly.