Quotes About Skill

I had lunch with a chess champion the other day. I knew he was a chess champion because it took him 20 minutes to pass the salt.

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying.

You're only as good as your last haircut.

The simplest of women are wonderful liars who can extricate themselves from the most difficult dilemmas with a skill bordering on genius.

Life is like a piano... what you get out of it depends on how you play it.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece." —John Ruskin

Barlozzo's word for nonchalance is sprezzatura. A hard word, a hard concept. The translation is "the state of effortlessness." It means the mastering of something—an art, a life—without really working at it, with the result being nonchalance.

I don't think of myself as a comedian, but as an artist, a scientist and chemist who just happens to be funny. I started doing stand-up to add another level to my game. I feel that I'm a young rookie with a veteran's skill.

Comedy is very hard, but you have to learn the art and science of it.

It takes at least five years of rigorous training to be spontaneous.

we know that repeated practice changes the brain

Annoying people is something of a talent of mine. I gave it up for a while, but lately it's started to come back to me.

Target Two made a wild grab for her fallen projectile weapon. I kicked the weapon over to Tifany, who snatched it up and secured it. (Yes, it was unnecessary and showing off.)

Good form and technique is a means to an end - for example, your punches will be more powerful if done right - rather than the objective itself.

If I don't practice for two weeks, my audience notices. If I don't practice for a day I notice.

Most programmers, even experienced ones, are poor judges of how code actually performs.

A statement Kent Beck often makes about himself, "I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

A man who cannot work without his hypodermic needle is a poor doctor. The amount of narcotic you use is inversely proportional to your skill.

If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to.

French and Italian hospitality industries, food service employees take pleasure in being the best at what they do. They may be the finest oyster shucker, the most knowledgeable vintner, an expert cheese purveyor. Toiling in an American supermarket is widely presumed to be a stopgap job, seldom a vocation.

The ball doesn't know how old I am.

Industry without talent is useless. Talent without industry is exasperating. The two together can make an artist.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better