Quotes About Mastery

Self-control is true power.

It's not the music you hear in your head that other people are going to hear. You have to be able to make it true enough to the image in your head, and that's where technique and technology come in, for sure, and knowledge. It's not true and will never be true that someone who knows nothing can sit in a basement and make great music.

The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn't matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.

I think there's no truer and more pure purpose than to be able to refine your art to a point where you feel it's as possible as it can be.

An artist can be truly evaluated only after he is dead. At the very 11th hour, he might do something that will eclipse everything else.

There are very few actors who are truly good at improvising; that's a real skill.

I wouldn't argue that anyone living can play the trumpet better than Wynton Marsalis.

Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.

I can play anything - piano, drums, guitar, harp - I can even play a trumpet through another trumpet.

I bought a crystal ball, and I wanted to use it, but I didn't know how, and I wouldn't use it until I developed a technique to use it that was truthful.

What I am looking for is a masterpiece. I don't want to waste my time. I am tired of experiments.

When you can throw 97 miles an hour and put the ball over the plate anytime you want, it's fun.

I'm not used to seeing the ball go wherever she wants. As a pitcher, I like to be - I don't want to say perfect, but I want to know what the ball is going to do.

As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.

Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.

Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills.

I tried to write a TV series, and then I discovered first of all that I love writing more than anything on this earth, and that you could write exactly as well as you want to.

Just make people better at something they want to be better at.

A lot of people just love music, especially a lot of aspiring artists. They just want to jump in and start making music. They don't really take time to grow and appreciate the craft.

I always stayed on before and after practice. I just think that if you want to excel at anything, be it basketball, dance or the piano, you need to practice a lot.

One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.

The key to a good life is finding things that you want to master.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Practice makes the Master. You can reconcile what you are and what you want to be.