Quotes About Quality

Bezos felt that hiring only the best and brightest was key to Amazon's success.

There is an unmistakable look to prison muscles, a smooth, marblelike quality as opposed to their puffier health club counterparts.

Grace hit the sidewalk. The weather was brisk. Autumn had shoved summer aside with a patented gust. The leaves hadn't really started turning yet, but the air had that apple-cider quality to it.

Day had surrendered her rays, but the field, made from some newfangled artificial turf, had stadium-quality lights.

There is only one real evil in the world: mediocrity.

How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

it is not how many people come, or even who comes (in the sense of status or position) that counts, rather it is the quality of the interaction and conversation that make the difference.

Mediocrity's like a spot on a shirt—it never comes off.

She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.

If you listen to the radio for a whole hour there's maybe one decent song. The rest is mass-produced garbage

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

It was a day like a slow-motion video of twilight. Uneventful, to put it mildly. The lead gray of the sky mixed ever so slowly with black, finally blending into night. Just another quality of melancholy. As if there were only two colors in the world, gray and black, shifting back and forth at regular intervals.

It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, he added, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.

Chevron, for example, has a decision-analysis group whose members facilitate decision-framing workshops; coordinate data gathering for analysis; build and refine economic and analytical models; help project managers and decision makers interpret analyses; point out when additional information and analysis would improve a decision; conduct an assessment of decision quality; and coach decision makers.

Producing an animation series merely to fill time slots in the broadcast schedule is like generating cultural pollution.

We only really need one of a good thing

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

More and more, you're seeing television shows that are better than 99% of the movies out there. I mean, you watch something like the last couple of seasons of 'The Sopranos,' which is some of the most sophisticated writing I've ever seen filmed and some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen - and it's a TV show.

Anything I've ever read by John Irving has been really well written.

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it's the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it's only a year, but not like a tweet, where it's only relevant for a day or a week.

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.