A Quote by Langston Hughes

The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it. — © Langston Hughes
The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it.
All you do as a performer is keep doing it. If you keep doing it, then it depends on why you're doing it. If you're doing something for superficial, monumental reasons and if you're doing it for female attention, or if you're doing it for money, it's like being upset. Only way you can get upset is when you expecting something. If you don't get this award or don't get that award, that because you expect something.
To start with you had to keep from getting arrested by the police. Then, you had to keep from getting cheated in the games. You also had to worry about collecting the money if you won. Then finally, after all that was said and done - you had to keep from getting hijacked.
I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens - you know, until it finds its own plot - because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.
Sometimes I catch myself doing something that I've already done. The more I've done, the more that's likely to happen. Then I just throw it away. I wait until I've got the right way of getting a thing done, which means my songwriting proceeds at a very slow pace. But it's the only way I can really work.
Find the confidence in whatever way you can to just keep moving onto the next page. The only way you will finish projects and get better is to keep moving forward.
Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else. Finish it before you start rewriting it. That's really important. It's to find out if you're going to be a writer or not, because that's one of the most important lessons. Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that's the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it.
I never get discouraged about anything. If I got discouraged I wouldn't keep giving out the script then the movie wouldn't be made. The biggest thing about movie industry is to never get discouraged because once you get discouraged you lose interest. You'll stop being successful in something you love doing. If you get discouraged in things and not even want to finish or do them, then why even bother starting?
When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.
The key is you have to keep doing the right thing. Do the right thing and stay around long enough, and you'll keep getting parts. And if you don't, you write your own parts, which I'm lucky to do. It's like anything else: you get hot, you get cold, then you get hot again. You just keep working.
We just need to keep improving. Keep doing what we are doing and get better. That's the only way forward.
Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it.
The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.
In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.
The only thing experience teaches you is what you can't do. When you start, you think you can do anything. And then you start to get a little tired.
In my mind, only one inviolable precept exists in terms of being a successful writer: you have to write. The unspoken sub-laws of that one precept are: to write, you must start writing and then finish writing. And then, most likely, start writing all over again because this writing "thing" is one long and endless ride on a really weird (but pretty awesome) carousel. Cue the calliope music.
I went to London to do the stuff. I was like "What am I going to do? What's going to happen?" But then once you start working, you forget all that and you start enjoying what you're doing. Once you enjoy the process, you know that people are going to do the same thing. If you don't enjoy it and just do it like a job, then it's going to be feel that way. That's my theory of doing a movie.
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