330 Quality Quotes

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

If I give you a good wine, you will see how it tastes and after you ask where it comes from.

I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.

Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.

If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment.

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

Less is only more where more is no good.

Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.

Ther nis no werkman, whatsoevere he be, That may bothe werke wel and hastily.

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food.

It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.

When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

There are many kinds of love, as many kinds of light, And every kind of love makes a glory in the night. There is love that stirs the heart, and love that gives it rest, But the love that leads life upward is the noblest and the best.

Good people drink good beer.

There are single thoughts that contain the essence of the whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of large work.

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. (p. 79)

For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.

When I started on Disneyland, my wife used to say, 'But why do you want to build an amusement park? They're so dirty.' I told her that was just the point - mine wouldn't be.

When we consider a project, we really study it - not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.

That irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

When asked 'How do you know a restaurant has good chili?' McGuire's answer, 'If the waitress has dirty ankles, the chili is good.'

I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's written language.

If you are going to do something, do it well. And leave something witchy.

There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Affected dispatch is one of the most dangerous things to business that can be. It is like that, which the physicians call predigestion, or hasty digestion; which is sure to fill the body full of crudities, and secret seeds of diseases. Therefore measure not dispatch, by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of the business.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers ... What they really hate are lousy programmers.

[about starring in 'Jaws: The Revenge'] I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how 'important' it is? (Ibid.)

Everybody thinks that Disneyland is a gold mine - but we have had our problems. You've got to work it and know how to handle it. Even trying to keep the park clean is a tremendous expense. And those sharp-pencil guys tell you, 'Walt, if we cut down on maintenance, we'd save a lot of money.' But I don't believe in that - it's like any other show on the road; it must be kept clean and fresh.

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.

Next to excellence, comes the appreciation of it.

'At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.' 1958

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern

One might say that every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. A quality which one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden... It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by using his 'imagination' upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby after a few years. If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind 'teased' by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.

In the arena of human life the honours and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities.

No good movie is depressing; all bad movies are depressing.

The fecundity and the importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it contains.

Build it right, and they will come.

Stock is like a computer--crap in, crap out.

Last but not least, one cup of heavy cream. That's right, heavy cream. Look, I said I would help you make premium ice cream. I didn't say anything about low carb ice cream, or low fat ice cream, or low anything else ice cream. As far as I'm concerned, ice cream shouldn't be low anything! It should just taste good!

Golden brown and delicious.

Everyone that works on the show (on the TV side) has done serious time in commercials and movies and we tend to treat every episode of Good Eats like a little movie. I direct them just as I did commercials, heavy on composition.

Ooh, Chef got hold of a bad avocado there, and that happens. And he's not liking that one either. Do not wave your knife at me, I did not buy the produce, Chef!

If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve.

Mas vale ser enganado en el precio que en la mercaderia.

I watched a rerun on television of a 1960s comedy programme called 'Mr Ed', which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material.

Britney: Love to me is a lot of things. Love is respect. Love is commitment. Love is honesty. Love is trust. Love is not just love. Love is all of those things combined.

Wine may become so dilute that few will drink of it.

At every date he goes out and sits in every section of the hall to listen to the sound. And if it isn't right, even in the last row, I hear about it and we make changes. I mean every date too.

The greatest of superficial novelists... It were, in our opinion, an offense against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest novelists.

I don't think that fans of RAGE or Soundgarden will be disappointed.

Prince : (Every shoot he takes) Good..

'It doesn't matter what size your pencil is; it's how you write your name.'

It wasn't supposed to be pink vinyl; it's supposed to be peppermint vinyl, so it's supposed to look like one of those peppermint candies with the red and white swirlies. They fucked it up so it's pink. What's the name of that pressing plant? Well, whatever it is... don't use it! You'll be on Frilly Pink and you'll be forced to buy flowers from Adama's Flower Shop.

Whether it's good or bad, it's our best album.

What do you think of Puccini? [ Britten: 'I think his operas are dreadful.' ] No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music.

Well, a novel does acquire a certain kind of richness when you work on it for a long time that can't really be faked.

Who is booking this crap? The Rock against Billy Gunn; The Rock against Gangrel. Next week, they'll be having The Rock laying the Smackdown on the Brooklyn Brawler, for Christ's sake.

I believe in the goods I sell.

'Elvis Presley`s talent as a musical artist was double barrelled and more; his voice, on the one hand, was extraordinary for its quality, range and power, as well as being a unique stage performer with instinctive natural abilities in both areas; he was the master of a wide and diverse range of vocal stylings and ventriloquist effects, from the clear tenor of his C&W heroes, to the vibrato of the Gospel singers he loved, his voice invariably possessing an aching sincerity and an indefinable quality of yearning virtually impossible to pigeonhole'.

' From the darkest of backgrounds, Elvis' voice emerges with such realism that you could take singing lessons, his vocals so irresistible and smooth, and with such startling definition, that the clearest and most concise way I can describe the experience, is that I never felt as though I was listening to a recording'

American Beer is a lot like making love on a canoe - it's fucking close to water.

Like strawberry wives, that laid two or three great strawberries at the mouth of their pot, and all the rest were little ones.

I've been accused of saying I was the greatest architect in the world and if I had said so, I don't think it would be very arrogant, because I don't believe there are many [great architects] - if any. For 500 years what we call architecture has been phony.

Rest comes not from the quantity but from the quality of sleep.

Of course there are boob and bad reporters who bring in boob and bad items which are printed, and which make so many papers what they are. But there are more intelligent men who try to bring in intelligent items, only to see them changed into imbecile items, with the result that they may easily give up trying, and accustom themselves instead to the spirit of the office....

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our water and air that are doing it.

What happened is the music listener has become much more of a connoisseur and a king of his own destiny. You can no longer shove an album down their throats and say, 'Here's 15 songs, four of them are good, you know. Spend 20 dollars on this CD.' It's not going to happen. That's what has taken the music industry down.

His poetry, as a whole, is more nearly the real right thing than any of the poetry of a somewhat older generation than mine except Mr. Yeats's.

I wonder if that referee is constructing an advertisement for the abolition of the very sport that he is a part of?

The man in charge must concern himself with details. If he does not consider them important, neither will his subordinates. Yet 'the devil is in the details.' It is hard and monotonous to pay attention to seemingly minor matters. In my work, I probably spend about ninety-nine percent of my time on what others may call petty details. Most managers would rather focus on lofty policy matters. But when the details are ignored, the project fails. No infusion of policy or lofty ideals can then correct the situation.