Matthew Weiner Quotes

Writing is grunt work - you need to have self-motivation, perseverance, and faith... talent is the smallest part of it.

These days, I find I'm applying a little more patience to my process. If I look back on my work, I can see those songs I bailed on could have been better, that had those great two verses and then I kind of coasted from there. These days, if a song is giving me trouble, I put it aside and pick it up later, and keep doing that, for a year if I have to, until it takes shape.

When you are a filmmaker, you need to be rooted, because committing yourself to producing or directing a film is a good three-year process.

Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and remain tenacious and just believe the end will come. Other times it's not an issue. You just write on and the end comes naturally.

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.

We are telling the American people to have patience, courage, resolve and determination.

It's a war of attrition. If you have patience and a modicum of faith in yourself your chances are not too bad.

Patience and Diligence, like faith, remove mountains.

At a certain point in the writing of any book, you become absolutely certain that it's terrible and is only getting more terrible with every word you write. This is normal. You just have to keep going, push your way through, and have faith that, through practice and experience and determination, you will get to the end.

Younger songwriters will ask me, 'What did you do?' And it's like, 'Well, I worked a day job, and I didn't stake anything. I didn't quit my day job. I didn't have any hopes at all. I just did the thing that I believed in, and I waited a long time.'

Endurance is patience concentrated.

The most important thing is to understand that this career is not about speed. It's about stamina. This is a marathon. It's not a 50-meter sprint. You have to persevere and understand it takes a lot of time. You have to know you're going to knock on 100 doors and 99 of them are going to close in your face.

Director Jai Krishna is an optimist who has a never-say-die attitude. He has impressed me thoroughly with his faith in the industry. Not many are aware of the fact that this man had to wait for almost 30 years in this industry to direct 'Vanmam,' his first film.

Patience is the name of the game in Bollywood.

I always say that with work and patience, if you believe in your own talent, at the end, things come back; there's no doubt about it.

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."

Lots of times I'm not crazy about the writing, but I keep moving ahead and somehow it gets better. The important thing is to move forward.

I'm directing the Sky show. I'm not going to be in it. I'm just writing and directing it. So that'll satisfy that part of my brain.

Many of my biggest business endeavors were failures before they became a success. Some failed for as long as six years before they hit. Everyone around me thought I was crazy. You just have to stay at it.

It is the first line that gives the inspiration and then it's like riding a bull. Either you just stick with it, or you don't.

I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

Dream big - dream very big. Work hard - work very hard. And after you've done all you can, you stand, wait and fully surrender.

There are going to be moments of deep, deep doubts, and you have to have faith that your initial idea was good and just muddle through.

I worked as hard to write the worst film of the year as I did to write the best film of the year.