Jodi Picoult Quotes

I want a painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems - if they don't overwhelm - the better. I would like to feel that I am involved at any stage of the painting with all its moments, not just this 'now' moment where a superficial grace is so available.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me.

Locke' was sort of myself trying to find out if you could give yourself the maximum number of obstacles to make enough drama and seeing if you could do it.

I like challenges. If you're involved, as one is, in filmmaking, you want to challenge yourself. You don't want to repeat what you're done before.

That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.

The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

I begin each book with a challenge to myself.

If something gets too easy... I want to do something else. But every album is going to be me, no matter what.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.

My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.

Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.

I feel like I have a job to do, like I constantly have to reinvent myself. The more I up the ante for myself, the better it is in the long run. I try to interact with my fans as much as possible. It's good that the person I'm being onstage isn't really an act. It's really me.

If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.

I'm attracted to playing things that I find difficult, just because it's a journey that is much more interesting.

To change, that is the most difficult thing to accomplish.

Challenge is the pathway to engagement and progress in our lives. But not all challenges are created equal. Some challenges make us feel alive, engaged, connected, and fulfilled. Others simply overwhelm us. Knowing the difference as you set bigger and bolder challenges for yourself is critical to your sanity, success, and satisfaction.

I don't like doing things that are too easy.

I had fears going into television that it might become boring to me, and I always like to be challenged, push myself. You do a film, and you know where you're going; you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.

When I'm making stuff, the thing that excites me most is not the result, but the process and trying to do something I've never done before.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

If you're not challenged, you'll get bored.