Jonah Lehrer Quotes

Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.

I think all great innovations are built on rejections.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.

At Pixar, we do a million versions of the movie, and every one of them goes through their awkward teenage phase where it's terrible and doesn't make sense, and we just keep working on it.

When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.

I try not to agonize over my lyrics, though, because that can come across in them. Some lyrics come more easily than others and some you have to spend a lot of time on, but I think you have to watch that you don't take the life out of them by worrying too much.

Nothing is invented and perfected at the same time.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

Every song is a long process. First I have to write a story for it, and then to make it into a song, I have to make it short and then shorter - so it's not easy!

I'm still undisciplined in the fact that I'm not writing anything down. I just get these lines and start piecing it together and then going back.

Failing is part of my process. A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb 7 times to make it good. So I tweak it.

I think it's almost impossible to edit something to death. I think you can make things better almost indefinitely.

You deal with failure - strike, strike, strike - all the time. Acting is like that. You have to have a very thick skin in a way - your hair is too dark, you're too ugly for the part, your audition wasn't good.

I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing.

As an actor, rejection is a big part of it, and I've had a lot of it. So when there's something that you really want to do, it's so great to have someone to be a part of a team as great as this team is.

there are only so many ways to get rejected or ignored. It doesn't hurt at all anymore because why should someone who's a complete stranger have any control over your sense of selfworth?

Actually, I was a little rejected at first. I kind of got slapped down.

Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn't made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn't have been able to make the thing that they liked.

It goes without saying that I will do anything at any price to pull myself out of a situation like this [rejection] so that I can start work immediately on my next Salon picture and ensure that such a thing should not happen again.