Anish Kapoor Quotes

I think people love to attach themselves to the idea of an overnight success. That may be true about me.

Things which do not require effort of some sort are seldom worth having.

A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can't give you a formula for that.

Success was overnight, but it was a very long night.

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.

There's very few geniuses that come and revolutionize everything. For the rest of us that want to be artists and have something to say, it's a lot of work and a lot of luck.

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

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.

I worked 18 years to become an overnight success. Now MagicPlace.com will short circuit that process for people.

At Pixar, 'Wall-E' was our ninth film, and they've all been successes - more than that, they've all really touched people. Everybody wonders, 'How do you do it?' Well, how do you not do it? You just work hard.

Things that look like an 'overnight success' typically are not.

When I'm in the studio, I stay in the studio, like, sometimes 20 hours out the day.

None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

One of the factors that still keeps me in the studio is that every so often I have to more or less start all over.

I looked at people like Lil Wayne. I would go to the studio and I would observe Wayne, and I would literally pray. I would say 'God, give me his work ethic'.

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

Reading [Judd Apatow] book, about his background, I think there's a great similarity. What gives him the fire to work hard? He worked hard, researching the comedians of the time, what touched him about it.

I do know that kind fate allowed me to find a couple of nice ideas after many years of feverish labor.

Inspiration and work ethic - they ride right next to each other.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

Excellence isn't achieved without inspiration and perspiration. You've got to have both.

Too often in the past, we have thought of the artist as an idler and dilettante and of the lover of arts as somehow sissy and effete. We have done both an injustice. The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has labored hard, often amid deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening. His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline.

[Directing first film:] I was terrified, it was really very scary because there is a lot of responsibility. I think I was terrified because I wanted it to work so much. A lot of actors direct movies but I thought the stakes were kind of higher for me because I really, really cared. [...] I just worked as hard as I possibly could on every single thing, every single day. I said that if this failed it would not be because I didn't work as hard as I possibly could...every day.

If you pour your heart into your work, or into any worthy enterprise, you can achieve dreams others may think impossible.