I read in yesterday’s New York Times that the novelist Phyllis Whitney died. She was 104 and, according to the obituary, once said she stayed young by writing. She last published in 1994.

Then last night I went to see “Starting Out in the Evening.” In the film, Frank Langella portrays an elderly novelist whose life is turned upside down by a young grad student. In the final scene, after he is back home following a stroke, we see him setting a cup of tea and plate of toast and jam by his bed. The camera zooms in on the tea and toast, and then it cuts to him at his typewriter pecking out words as he works on his novel.

The coincidence of the two - Langella’s performance as the aging writer and Whitney’s obituary - reminded me of a project my friend Kelly Morgan was working on years ago concerning the correlation between creativity and longevity. But that’s a subject for another day. It was something else entirely that made me clip out a paragraph from Whitney’s obit and set it on my desk. Here’s what I saved.

“Ms. Whitney ascribed her success as a writer to persistence and an abiding faith in her abilities. ‘Never mind the rejections, the discouragement, the voices of ridicule (there can be those too),’ she wrote in “Guide to Fiction and Writing.” ‘Work and wait and learn, and that train will come by. If you give up, you’ll never have a chance to climb aboard.’”

Sound advice, I think, and not just for writers. Work and wait and learn. And continue to show up at the station.