Quotes About Talent

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

You are talking to a man who can only play a plastic keyboard. Give me anything weighted and I've had it. I haven't got the strength in my fingers to push them down. So I don't get a lot of expression on the keyboard.

Of good natural parts, and of a liberal education.

Instead of assigning grades according to merit, plan to simply add all my student's scores together and divide by the total number of students. Since I grade on a bell curve, this means that every student---every semester in every class---will receive a grade of 'C'. Nothing would please Karl Marx more than knowing that regardless of talent or effort everyone will get the same outcome in my classes.

If God wanted us to play soccer, he would've given only 1 in 11 people arms.

Genius is perseverence in disguise.

It breaks my heart to see these young, really talented bands getting chewed up into the system. I remember a time if you'd signed to a major label it was such a sell out! But now... unless you've signed to a big label, you're a failure now.

and Justin Beaver's greatest hits. He's totes the best musician ever.

I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.

Pablo Picasso resisted school stubbornly and seemed completely unable to learn to read or write. To other students grew used to seeing him come late with his pet pigeon -- and with the paintbrush he always carried as if it were an extension of his own body.

Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play.

Naw, I wasn't going to sell my principles for them. I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn't call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good. And that's what I did then and now. Critics can take that or leave it.

My dad says I could sing before I could talk, if that's possible. I was always humming and things like that.

The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.

We are all born with genius. It's like our fairy godmother. But what happens in life is that we stop listening to our inner voices, and we no longer have access to this extraordinary ability to create poetry.

Competence can be a curse

I'm not interested in fairness. And your God doesn't seem interested in fairness when He gives out talent. I see mediocrity or ambition most of the time. You have talent, but no ambition. That's why you're stuck here.

I'm not good at anything except writing jokes. I wasn't good at sports, I wasn't good at anything artsy, ever. I think there was a real worry for a while about what I would be good at. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd.

One of the unexpected and wonderfully fair things I have learned in my career is that if Hollywood were filled just with perfect-looking people, then soap operas would be the most-watched things in the world. But they're not. Looks are great, but they're not compelling enough. I've noticed that successful actors with long careers are usually talented actors with charismatic screen presences, and all of them exude one thing: confidence.

In England, with all due respect, we have some of the plainest actresses in the entire world as our greatest.

I was equally in love with singing and acting from an early age.

Discovering a hidden talent is actually a very big deal. It can save your life, as it did for my mother. It can save your emotional life, giving you the hope and energy to go on, as it did for Josie. It can save the life of the real you, the part of you that's special.

Yeah, my dad bought me a guitar when I was like 10, and I didn't really want it then.