Cheryl Strayed Quotes

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.

I have a real worker-bee mentality. Just show up, just do it. Even if you feel like s--t and you think you're terrible and you'll never get better and it will never go anywhere, just show up and do it. And, eventually, something happens.

You have to kind of roll with the punches. That's why I think work begets work to a certain degree. I just try and keep busy.

I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.

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

Writing is hard work, and fun, and requires you to keep your backside in a chair when you would sometimes like to put it elsewhere. So the only wisdom is the advice to keep at it, I guess.

For sure I think that at the end of the day if I got started a little sooner on stuff that was more written more permanent I would have just made a lot of mistakes earlier. I don't know if it would have led to earlier success but I think it would have led to thicker skin and it would have gotten the ball rolling.

I started out as an actor, but I forced myself to be a writer, even though I wasn't very good at it and had never written. I don't think I ever passed an English course in my life. My first eight to 10 scripts were pretty horrendous, but I stayed at it, stayed at it, and stayed at it, until I eventually found a voice and a subject like Rocky that people were interested in.

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

I think one of my biggest lessons so far in life is that hard work really does pay off. It may not culminate in the way you expected it to, but I have found that when I really put my head down and apply myself, I often get a good result.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.

If we think it takes a lot of effort and hard work to get what we want, then our life is going to be about struggle.

I'm sure you've felt this way along the way: Yes, I got to do what I wanted to do. But it was much harder than I thought it was going to be, and it continues to be. You never get to a place that is a place of rest. I think that's OK. It's not bad - life is hard work!

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.

Hard work is good for the soul, and it keeps you from feeling sorry for yourself because you don’t have time.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway.

There's a phrase, "sitzfleisch", which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, "If the muse is late for work, start without her". You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you're probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow.

For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.

There's few things that get you over your own crap more than working hard.

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

It's okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn't last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much. Then you find another reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bills pile up. Then you think: "Well, I'm the sensitive type. I have to express myself." Do me a favor. Don't be so sensitive. Be tough. It will get you further along when you get rejected. Finally, you just do it because you happen to like it.

I think that everybody does hustle in order to survive. That doesn't mean lying - it's more about how you handle situations.

It's not natural to have to suffer when we work. We're made to be productive, and yet the world we live in, there's a whole bunch of suffering. And what they need to understand as 10-year-olds, so that when they're 15 and slightly less protected, and when they're 20 and they're moving into a truly semi-independent state, they need to have experienced that memory of persevering and having gotten through hardship.