The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.
Danielle Steel

You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people, than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
Bernard Meltzer

Something like trying to protect yourself all the time, things like trying to outwit fate. Those things can be the worst thing you can do for yourself.
John Frusciante

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
Mary Oliver

I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
Mary Oliver

Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.
Sandra Cisneros

I'm afraid I'm still trying to find that balance. Especially now that everyone wants a piece of me. I find that I have to become more and more reclusive, and pick and choose when I am public and when I am private.
Sandra Cisneros

We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.
Stephen Sondheim

When I come into the theatre I get a sense of security. I love an audience. I love people, and I act because I like trying to give pleasure to people.
Vivien Leigh

I've never had a bank account in Switzerland since 1984. Why would the Swiss do this to me? Maybe the Swiss are trying to divert attention from the Holocaust gold scandal.
Benazir Bhutto

In the beginning I used to make one terrible play a game. Then I got so I'd make one a week and finally I'd pull a bad one about once a month. Now, I'm trying to keep it down to one a season.
Lou Gehrig

But now I realize that this record business really needs me. No one else is trying to take a chance or do something different.
Erykah Badu

It's not about trying to be funny all the time. It's more of a document that hopefully is funny.
David Cross

In New York there isn't that weird palpable competitive thing where it's friendly but everyone isn't trying to top one another with jokes when you're just hanging around.
David Cross

Quarreling over food and drink, having neither scruples nor shame, not knowing right from wrong, not trying to avoid death or injury, not fearful of greater strength or of greater numbers, greedily aware only of food and drink - such is the bravery of the dog and boar.
Xun Zi

I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.
Jasper Johns

Eddie Fisher married to Elizabeth Taylor is like me trying to wash the Empire State Building with a bar of soap.
Don Rickles

We are losing the democracy that we're trying to sell in the Mideast and everywhere else right here in our own nation.
Rosie O'Donnell

Mama and Daddy King represent the best in manhood and womanhood, the best in a marriage, the kind of people we are trying to become.
Coretta Scott King