Quotes About Excellence

Iran has been strong in individual sports like wrestling, judo and weightlifting, but we have never excelled at team sports.

Do I think my wrestling is the best? No, I think it's up there around the top.

The thing about Brock has always been, who can push Brock to a level where you actually get to see the best of Brock Lesnar, because very rarely have people ever gotten a chance to see that. I mean, really, who can keep up with him? This is not wrestling hype: he's a once-in-a-lifetime athlete.

Whether it's MMA or wrestling, I try to find the best people and go after the best people.

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

I've always loved Don Cheadle and Jeffery Wright and even Sam Jackson.

I enjoy where I am and I don't have a problem with being Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci, Don Cheadle, or Jeffrey Wright. They're not the lead of every movie they're in, but every time you see them they're really good.

A singer can quit once he or she has made ten great songs; a director can finish once he or she has made five amazing films; a writer just needs to write three great books.

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

Other writers, producers, and directors of low-budget films would often put down the film they were making, saying it was just something to make money with. I never felt that. If I took the assignment, I'd give it my best shot.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular 'ism', but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish.

God is in the details.

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

Un homme, au contraire, ne devait-il pas tout connaître, exceller en des activités multiples, vous initier aux énergies de la passion, aus raffinements de la vie, à tous les mystères?

Quand on se compare à ce qui vous entoure, on s'admire ; mais quand on lève les yeux plus haut, vers les maîtres, vers l'absolu, vers le rêve, comme on se méprise  !

Emma se sentí satisfeta interiorment creient que havia assolit d'un sol cop aquell rar ideal propi de les existències pàl·lides al qual els cors mediocres no podran arribar mai.

Frédéric pensait à la chambre qu'il occuperait là-bas, au plan d'un drame, à des sujets de tableaux, à des passions futures. Il trouvait que le bonheur mérité par l'excellence de son âme tardait à venir.

Good enough is good enough. There is time for refinement later. It's not how great you start—it's how great you end up.