Overwhelming Task Quotes

I am busier than a whore working two beds.

I feel like a repair man behind a dyke. No sooner do I plug one leak, than another springs.

Touring the world was almost like a side project that got out of control. It's like two incredibly demanding full-time jobs that I'm trying to do at once.

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.

And what am I to do on the occasion? -- It seems an hopeless business.

In all the years that I've been doing this, I've never launched a tour and launched an album at basically the same time. Doing one of those things is enough!

I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task.

Most directors prefer to direct everything themselves. I thought I could on Lord Of The Rings, but very quickly found out that the sheer scale prevented it.

Looking back at it now, it's almost overwhelming, the amount of work that went into writing 'Shine', and to come up with the ideas that we're doing now.

I felt like I was staring out across an ocean that I was going to have to swim from shore to shore before I could rest again.

The Armful For every parcel I stoop down to seize I lose some other off my arms and knees, And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns, Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once Yet nothing I should care to leave behind. With all I have to hold with hand and mind And heart, if need be, I will do my best. To keep their building balanced at my breast. I crouch down to prevent them as they fall; Then sit down in the middle of them all. I had to drop the armful in the road And try to stack them in a better load.

At 21, right out of college, I had two producers, about my age, who had never produced a show before, and they wanted me to write and produce an hour-long show before I turned 22. Which is a whole lot of work for someone who's just an 'airhead.'

If I have to climb to heaven on a ladder, I shall decline the invitation.

...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.

You see, Momo... it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept... And then you hurry. You work faster and faster, and every time you look up there seems to be just as much to sweep as before, and you try even harder…, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop-and still the street stretches away in from of you.

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

I think I'll not attempt to do a 'Fish Out Of Water 2.'

A writer should always feel like he's in over his head

Every time I start a new novel, it seems like an impossible undertaking. If I tried to do too much too quickly, I would get lost and feel overwhelmed. I have to go slow, and give things a chance to take form and grow.

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

There's nothing worse when you have a job, and you read something, and you're like, 'God. How am I possibly going to make this work?'

Work was like cats were supposed to be: if you disliked and feared it and tried to keep out if its way, it knew at once and sought you out and jumped on your lap and climbed all over you to show how much it loved you. Please God, he thought, don't let me die in harness.

I have now taken a serious task upon myself and I fear a greater one that is in the power of any man to perform in the given time-but it is too late to go back.