Quotes About Skill

I first picked up a violin aged five - I just assumed everyone played.

It was really amazing. I mean, he'd never mentioned that he played in the symphony, like serious violin playing, not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.

You know, if you really want to fiddle the old-time way, you've got to learn the dance. The contra-dances, hoedowns. It's all in the rhythm of the bow. The great North Carolina fiddle player Tommy Jarrell said, 'If a feller can't bow, he'll never make a fiddler. He might make a violin player, but he'll never make no fiddler.'

I play guitar, bass, drums, piano, and pretty much any sort of stringed instrument - besides violin or cello.

Cello is my first instrument, then piano, drums, bass, violin, recorder, saxophone, but I'd never play them live!

I've played classical violin since I was 5 years old.

By the time we reached Virginia City I was considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age.

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

Virtually all big law firms have good to super-good lawyers. All big law firms don't have great litigators.

Almost any decent cook will make food by eye and taste. Virtually all of my family cooked that way.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Tact is one of the first mental virtues, the absence of it is fatal to the best talent.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.

By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso.

Being a good game show panelist is like being a virtuoso of the kazoo.

I was never really a virtuoso guitar player per se.

Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.

Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.

I'm a virtuoso in my job in that there's not an actor I can't go into a scene with and be absolutely confident that, whatever is required of my character, I can do it.

I was a virtuoso of all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached 17.

Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice; and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue.

There is a considerable amount of manipulation in the printmaking from the straight photograph to the finished print. If I do my job correctly that shouldn't be visible at all, it should be transparent.

Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.

You could put all the talent I had into your left eye and still not suffer from impaired vision.