Quotes About Genius

I think all kids are creative, so I wouldn't say my kids are geniuses. But they immediately respond to music. And they've got great rhythm!

People call me a genius. I don't know much about geniuses. But I do believe that what I achieved was not just because of the ability that I was born with but also because I worked hard.

People who are geniuses, once they get going, you really have to keep up.

George Saunders is a complete genius.

Creative genius is a divinely bestowed gift which is the coronation of the few.

When the audience reacts all together, it's genius. The audience is its own being in a way. It's a weird, amorphous beast that is also somehow a golden emperor that is also somehow every adult you've ever come across in your life who doesn't approve of you - all in one place.

One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like.

For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working around me like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamertine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practise four to five hours a day of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don't go mad you will find me an artist!

I believe in individuality, but individuals are to the mass, like waves to the ocean. The highest order of genius is as dependent as the lowest. It, like the loftiest waves of the sea, derives its power . . . from the grandeur and vastness of the ocean of which it forms a part. We differ as the waves, but are one as the sea.

All great artists and thinkers are great workers.

My genius is in my nostrils.

The people told me, however, that the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believed in the people when they spake of great men - and I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing.

Beethoven's music is music about music.

If the poet is not a real genius, I do not know what a genius is.

Worship of the genius is an echo of this reverence for gods and princes. Wherever one endeavours to elevate individual men to the superhuman, the tendency also exists to imagine whole classes of people as rougher and more base than they really are.

O povo, contudo, dizia-me que a orelha grande era não só um homem, mas um grande homem, um gênio. Eu, porém, nunca acreditei no povo quando ele me falava de grandes homens, e sustento a minha idéia de que era um aleijado às avessas que tinha pouquíssimo de tudo e uma coisa em demasia.

The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: he squanders himself. That is his greatness! … He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself—and this is a calamitous involuntary fatality, no less than a river's flooding the land.

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.

I'm solitary as a pulled tooth, Lonely as an unwelcome truth, Lost as a minnow out of school, A genius in a crop of fools.

One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That's why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.

I wish - I wish instead of just recommending these books, I could set them down at your doorstep. The collected stories of John Updike, the second volume of T.C. Boyle's collected stories, and Stanley Crouch's book about the rise and times of our genius saxophone player Charlie Parker. These are deep books, books that you can get lost in.

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.

Poesy must not be drawn by the ears: it must be gently led, or rather, it must lead, which was partly the cause that made the ancient learned affirm it was a divine, and no human skill, since all other knowledges lie ready for any that have strength of wit; a poet no industry can make, if his own genius be not carried into it.

All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.