Quotes About Skill

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

a skilled soldier kills your enemies, but a skilled duelist kills your allies. I

People always think that if they are expert at something, that thing must therefore be extremely important.

And then there's the gun itself. No man in his right mind will play with a gun. I've seen show-offs doing fancy spins and all that. No real gun-fighter ever did. With a hair-trigger, he'd be likely to blow a hole in his belly. The gun-fighter knows enough of guns to be wary of them. He treats them with respect. A pistol was never made for anything except killing, and a gunfighter never draws a gun unless to shoot, and he shoots to kill.

I've written all these stories without any pornography, without any obscenity. I grew up among sailors and miners and lumberjacks and the roughest kind men in the world, but I never found it necessary to use all that in the stories. I can make them real without that. I think much of that kind of writing is a coverup for lack of real skill.

The Indian must not lose pride in what he does, in his handicraft, for if he loses pride he will no longer build, his art will fail him, and he will completely be dependent upon others.

Some men are gifted to paint, some to write, and some to lead men. For me it was always to e this, not to kill men, although in the years to come I was to kill more than I liked, but to command such situations as this.

Twitch had been arrested for stealing a car. He claimed he could break into a car, disconnect the alarm, and hot-wire the engine, all in less than a minute.

If Amy went to court without any rehearsal beforehand, she'd know exactly what to do.

Talent isn't genius.

talent isn't genius and you can't make it so

As he wrote of Rockefeller, "His deliberation was sometimes extreme; his reluctance to argue and speak out his thoughts fully, his skill in not exposing the slightest surface for attack, his long silences

Knowledge of a subject doesn't necessarily mean you can do anything with it. That would require skill. Likewise, a student can commit something to memory with no knowledge whatsoever. A grade-schooler, for example, might be able to recite the multiplication table perfectly, but still be unable to solve simple math problems. Coming to know something implies the goal of being able to use the knowledge, while being aware of facts or figures does not. Of

When someone masters something, it becomes a part of that person. It becomes part of the individual's thought and creative process. It adds the quality of its essence to all subsequent thought and creativityof the individual.

Ya lo señaló la formidable (y depresiva) Clarice Lispector: «La vocación es diferente del talento. Se puede tener vocación y no tener talento. Es decir, se puede ser llamado sin saber cómo ir».

but also for the sweater most expertly knitted from hand-spun wool

Antony was neat-fingered and had obviously done this thing many times before, but still indulged in a good deal of cursing and bad language before the new bow and a few arrows were finally done.

I had come down here, not to serve God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not.

Here was a new craft that a man could tuck away in his head and by the look of the large wide world unfolding itself before him, it seemed that the more a man knew the better for him.

Before the motorcar replaced the horse, and for some years after there were many illustrators who drew horses with the same authority with which they drew the human figure; now there are very few who can do that. Most modern illustraters fudge a horse the best they can and hope to get on by the technique.

Arik was the master of caesarean sections. Arik could perform a caesarean in three minutes.

They knew how to make a spoon that was exactly the right shape to hold in your hand and put into your mouth, even if your hands were still small and your mouth was little.

I can tell you, she really knows her job. So do boa constrictors, said Audrey.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.