Zadie Smith Quotes

If you think you can do better, then do better. Don't compete with anyone; just yourself.

I always look for... hopefully look for a challenge. And you're always looking for the next summit to hit. Even if it's a personal one. It needn't be some great sense of monumental... It just has to be important to you and big enough and special enough and individual enough that you get up for it. And that can be anything.

I wanted to be successful, not famous.

Success for me means being able to work. I don't look at so much at what I've done as much as I look to what I will do.

Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.

I like to see a driven kid: somebody who wants to come from the ground up. I love to see somebody who wants to be the best they can be.

For me, competition is good; that is what keeps me on my toes and keeps me going. I am always trying to better my own work, do better than my earlier films... do films that are challenging and exciting for me.

A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.

I've got something to live for, because I always wanted to be an artist; I always wanted to be famous.

Although in skating you compete with other people, anyone who achieves a certain level of success is first and foremost competing against themselves. And for me, the idea that I could always do better, learn more, learn faster, is something that came from skating.

How do you go from where you are to where you wanna be? And I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal. And you have to be willing to work for it.

I think when people talk about ambition and talking to him, it might have seemed that he wasn't ambitious.

I'm always driven to keep doing something different and better.

I actually don't know anyone who wants to be famous for fame's sake, at least not anyone I respect. But you need to have a certain amount of power in order to be able to do what you want.

I would not be who I am if I were not putting pressure on me to up the level of my game further.

I like to challenge myself, to compare myself against the best.

Sometimes when I get asked by younger wrestlers, 'Do you have any advice for me? What do you think you can help me on?' and I tell them I think the best advice is to try and outdo yourself. Always be unique, always be creative. I think that was part of my success. I never wanted anybody to be on top of me. I always wanted to be number one.

I want to accomplish something for myself and set a bar for myself, for somebody to be like, 'Damn, Trippie legendary. He did such and such.'

You grow when there are trophies in your trophy cabinet. I hope to achieve that here in Naples.

There's a part of me that's ambitious.

Every time I do something in life, I try to outdo myself.

When I see a contemporary deliver a good performance, I get inspired to do better. I don't sit and mull over other people's successes; that can be unhealthy.

I always want to prove that I've improved.

I do care about success and all of those things. But I don't care enough to do movies just for that reason.

You write for glory. You play for glory. There's an ambition to excel, isn't there, to be a star? To score more, to do more, even when it's a team sport. So I think striving for glory is a natural subject for a writer. Seeking fame.