Quotes About Talent

Robin Van Persie is a sensational striker and one of the best in Europe.

I look at the things that Dick Van Dyke and Danny Kaye do on television, and I think: Maybe I could do that. And I never miss a Jack Lemmon picture.

I was like 4 years old when I started playing piano, and I was like 10 years old when I saw a documentary on the Dutch MTV about Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren, and all of the Dutch DJs, and it really inspired me.

So, okay, I'm not a genius. Vincent Van Gogh and Albert Einstein were geniuses.

Van Gogh cut off his ear for his art. I'm not tryin' to cut off my ear. I'm not humiliating myself.

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

When I was in Van Halen I was hitting notes that were out of my range. I never went for those registers before until Eddie pulled it out of me.

It's hard to say this about a guy like Eddie Van Halen, one of the greatest guitar players who ever lived, but he's really limited to a style and they're locked into it.

In my world, before I knew about Eddie Van Halen, I was playing piano, and at that point in my teenage life, I thought he was just a guitar player.

You can never deny the immense talent, rock credibility and iconic historical contribution that Van Halen made.

My grade 3 teacher put on a kids' Christmas concert, and I played the kazoo, so my mother bought me a trumpet. I took lessons for eight years, was in the Kitsilano Boys Band, and I played in the Vancouver Junior Symphony for two years.

So my thing is we want come in and diffuse anything that's not real, anything that doesn't associate with real hip-hop. We want to be the one that says, 'Yo, we want to help build and build a bigger and better industry.' I'm just like, 'Yo, with talent from Toronto, Vancouver, Quebec. Who's paying attention?'

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.

My strength as an actor is in the theater - I know that about myself. Some actors get onstage and vanish, but I'm much better there than I am on screen.

Great players are very good technically, but they also have a huge amount of character because, without it, you will never get to see that great technique because it vanishes under pressure.

Show business people aren't vapid.

I admire the work of brilliant actresses such as Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren, who have had such varied careers. They have never stopped working, and they are as great today as they ever were.

I work with different actors with varied degrees of experience.

Every movie that comes to me is an opportunity for me to show that I can play varied parts.

Variety shows didn't disappear; it was the caliber of the artists, the classic vaudevillians that have passed on. They are gone, so there's a different caliber performer that's come along that hasn't had the time to work in the small clubs and get the experience.

I'm interested in all forms of performance, yet I think it's difficult to be as equally talented in all of them as they call for such different skills. At the moment, I still feel I'm learning and want as much experience and variety as possible.

If you ask me the best bowler, then Wasim Akram was the best bowler because he had a lot of variety. Even when you were batting on 100 or 150, you're not very sure... He could still get you out. That was his forte.

Making music on TV used to be as common as commercials. In the '60s and '70s, prime time was stuffed with variety shows headlined by such major and treasured talents as Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, the Smothers Brothers and Richard Pryor, who had a very brief comedy-variety hour on NBC that was censored literally to death.

Today, the scope for variety has shrunk drastically. There are only a handful of topnotch composers like A. R. Rahman, Anu Malik, Jatin-Lalit... that's it.