Quotes About Dedication

But practice pares back the impossible

If life demanded a slavish commitment to one pursuit, there were worse things to commit to than calculating the cash value of death.

Entire weekends in basements pitching dice and arguing over esoteric role-playing rules with obese, anemic boy-men who tote suitcases full of collectible trading cards.

What decided him (almost invariably) was a college project in which he had occasion to do some independent research—to find out things for himself. Once he discovered the pleasures of this kind of work, he never turned back. He is completely satisfied with his chosen vocation. . . . He works hard and devotedly in his laboratory, often seven days a week.

No matter what you do with the rest of your life, nothing will be as important to the future of the World as your work on this Project right now.

The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge.

A page a day is a book a year. Listen to that again: a page a day is a book a year.

I work to support my habit of writing.

To his surprise he...discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something…that you cared about a great deal.

My favorite teacher in college advised me not to write a book until it was impossible not to.

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.

Sully always maintained that if you had ten guys working on a rock pile, Rub would be the last you'd fire for laziness. Only when you'd fired all the others would you realize that Rub had not yet addressed his first rock.

Because—and don't let anybody tell you different—novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.

If you were going to be reckless in this life, you needed total commitment to the principle.

Dedicated to all those who are in love with love and have eaten in the Banyan Tree

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

To the absolutist in every craftsman, each imperfection is a failure; to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a perception for failure.

A healthy obsession, we could say, interrogates its own driving convictions.

But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him.

We are more likely to fail as craftsmen due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.

The carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake.

You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.

This trip was not about running for president. This trip was preparing to BE president.

You're not getting away from me. Never again.