359 Talent Quotes

Unfortunately, it's possible to be able to do something extremely well that nobody ever wants done.

As soon as I got out there I felt a strange relationship with the pitcher's mound. It was as if I'd been born out there. Pitching just felt like the most natural thing in the world. Striking out batters was easy.

God felt sorry for actors, so he gave them a place in the sun and a lot of money. All they had to sacrifice was their talent.

I've always believed that acting is instinct to start with; you either have it or you don't.

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

No matter how substandard you feel your skill or talent may be, If you never produce your art, the world will always remain deprived of it.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.

Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.

The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.

The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me'.

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

Jimi Hendrix is very important. He's my idol. He sort of epitomizes, from his presentation on stage, the whole works of a rock star. There's no way you can compare him. You either have the magic or you don't. There's no way you can work up to it. There's nobody who can take his place.

Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.

I'm leaving the screen because I don't think I am very good in the pictures and I have this beautiful dream that I'm elegant on the stage.

In the great mass of our people there are plenty individuals of intelligence from among whom leadership can be recruited.

Talent is only the starting point.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them.

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

I would rather hire a man with enthusiasm, than a man who knows everything.

By labor and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.

Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday.

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

Notable talents are not necessarily connected with discretion.

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

At a talent show in sixth grade at Christ the King, my Catholic school in Seattle. I remember being incredibly nervous and also bringing the house down. Teachers were crying. I sang a song called 'One Tin Soldier.' A girl in my class knew it on piano and accompanied me.

'People will find something negative to criticize about you if they think you are talented in some area, simply due to their own sense of insecurity.'

Raw artistic talent is abundant. What is truly rare are the cultural circumstances, attitudes, and institutions to develop and perfect it. Few American cities have ever managed to foster a vibrant literary milieu of international significance - perhaps only Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. American literature has most often been an affair of isolated genius or small coterie.

'Why doesn't Dave Grohl run for President? I think he'd be good, he seems a very organised man. He has about 12 fingers in about 50 pies, and they're all great pies, and great fingers. What I'm saying is that we really respect that band, and I fucking love him!' - Chris Martin, 2002 [2]

'I think that Britney has blown more things than the gearbox on her Ferrari lately and Christina is living proof that you can polish a turd.'

Yeah, I can't play a thing at all. I cannot play an instrument. I do a lot of 'nah-nah-nah-doo-doo-doo' kinda stuff.

He considered himself to be a thoroughly useless man, taking up space in a world to which he contributed nothing - but he did have a talent for baking: The gas oven might blow up in his face, at last bringing him peace, but if it didn't, he would at least have cookies for Agnes.

He is thinner, taller, younger - more boyish-looking - than expected, but he is also the shyest and most nervous human being I have ever seen. He chews not merely his nails but his fingers, twitches his pouty mouth and chin, chain-smokes, wiggles his nose in constant adjustment of his spectacles, looks querulous one moment and ready to cry the next. His hands tremble, he stutters, his whole frame wobbles when he shakes hands:There is no betrayal of the thoughts behind those frightened, very intelligent eyes.

[She] wasn't very good... She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she'd be immolated after three performances.

Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor, Most gracious singer of high poems! where The dancers will break footing, from the care Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.

This boy had everything. He had the looks, the moves, the manager, and the talent. And he didn't look like Mr. Ed like a lot of the rest of us did. In the way he looked, way he talked, way he acted - he really was different.

'Elvis' initial hopes for a music career involved singing in a gospel male quartet. His favourite part was bass baritone, and he himself had an almost 3-octave vocal range... Yet to posterity's surprise, such a superlative and magnetic natural talent always remained humble --perhaps too humble to keep performing forever.'

'The young Elvis Presley, without any doubt.'

'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'.

'With the way he was marketed, he didn't even need to be able to sing the way he could. But Elvis had talent, plain and simple. The guy had a thousandth-octave range, and a variety in his vocal styles and approach, he could make more vocal tones, with just his voice, than a guitar player with 50 pedals and gadgets. If you never even saw the guy, you could plain feel, not just hear, the emotion and passion in his voice, and you are immediately taken in, one hundred percent. On the merit of vocals alone, he had more talent in the barbecue stuck in his teeth than the singers who sell millions of records do today.'

'Blues, country, pop, rock and roll, gospel, and beyond, this man could sing anything. From the rockabilly of the Sun Sessions, to the MOR of 'Wooden Heart'(1960), to the later day 'Burnin' Love' (1972), Elvis proved that he had the skills as a vocalist that few have, or will ever have'

'Arguably some of the most important tracks in the history of Rock and Roll, Elvis' SUN recordings demonstrate what a dynamic and talented vocalist he was; the young, raw, unadulterated Elvis whom musicologist Francis Davis once called 'the greatest white blues singer'; I'm not one to argue with Mr. Davis'

'Then, in mid 1968 he taped a television special in a black leather suit, in front of a select live audience, opening with 'Guitar Man' and closing with a mild social-conscience song, 'If I Can Dream'. But it wasn't until Greil Marcus brought out the recording of that performance for me, almost three years later, that I realized how significant it had been. Marcus has spent as much time listening as anyone who is liable to be objective, and he believes Elvis may have made the best music of his life that crucial comeback night. It's so easy to forget that Elvis was, or is, a great singer. Any account of his impact that omits that fundamental fact amounts to a dismissal.'

' He had an incredible, attractive instrument that worked in many registers; he could falsetto like Little Richard, his equipment was outstanding, his ear uncanny, and his sense of timing second to none; (in short) he could sing...'

If Fermi had been born a few years earlier, one could well imagine him discovering Rutherford's atomic nucleus, and then developing Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom. If this sounds like hyperbole, anything about Fermi is likely to sound like hyperbole.

The sense of worth derived from creative work depends upon 'recognition' by others, which is never automatic. As a result, the path of self-realization, even when it is the only open one, is taken with reluctance. Men of talent have to be goaded to engage in creative work. The groans and laments of even the most gifted and prolific echo through the ages.

Me? I play Gene Kelly...It's a guy who produces, directs, sings, and dances. who else could it be but Kelly.?

But when you're in a picture with Astaire, you've got rocks in your head if you do much dancing. He's so quick-footed and so light that it's impossible not to look like a hay-digger compared with him.

Montserrat Cabelle is sensational. She has that same kind of emotion as Aretha Franklin. The way she delivers a song is so very natural. It's a very different gift.

The difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was that he was selling the voice.

You'll have received an application from Mr Freeman Dyson to come to work with you as a graduate student. I hope that you will accept him. Although he is only 23 he is in my view the best mathematician in England.

What was the secret of Morphy's invincibility? I think it was a combination of a unique natural talent and brilliant erudition. His play was the next, more mature stage in the development of chess. Morphy had a well-developed feel for position, and therefore he can be confidently regarded as the first swallow - the prototype of the strong 20th century grandmaster.

He coude songes make, and wel endite.

'There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.'

He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

There are singers who can captivate a community. There are vocalists whose sound can penetrate deeply into your soul. There are entertainers who can mesmerize, enlighten and entertain, all in one breath. [And there is] Gloria Estefan -- who does it all, effortlessly.

Mr. Martin Tanner, a baritone, of Dayton, Ohio made his Town Hall debut last night. He came well prepared, but unfortunately his presentation was not up to contemporary professional standards. His voice lacks the range of tonal color necessary to make it consistently interesting. Full time consideration of another endeavor might be in order.

I was the youngest star the New York stage ever had and it darn near wrecked me.

All good song-writers have no more than half a dozen good tunes in their systems, and if they have that many, they are liberally blessed.

'If one is born with talent, one can have a wonderful life.'

In GE every day, there's an informal, unspoken personnel review-in the lunchroom, the hallways, and in every business meeting. That intense people focus-testing everyone in a myriad of environments-defines managing at GE. In the end, that's what GE is. We build great people, who then build great products and services.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent - which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next - one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.

No one shakes their bon-bon like I do, except Ricky [Martin].

I don't really live on compliments. As a matter of fact, they have a way of distracting me. I know a whole lot of musicians, artists out there who hears the compliments and thinks 'wow, I must have been really great' and so they get fat and satisfied and they get lost and forget about their actual talent and start living in another world.

I learned to spin and to sew; in sewing and spinning I fear no woman in Rouen.

Mozart was a freaky kind of shredder.

He was a bad acquaintance for a placid, sedentary soul like me, for though he could work like a Trojan when the fit took him, he was never at the same job very long. In the same week he would harass an Under-Secretary about horses for the Army, write voluminously to the press about a gun he had invented for potting aeroplanes, give a fancy-dress ball which he forgot to attend, and get into the semi-final of the racquets championship. I waited daily to see him start a new religion.

The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our eyes and wonder, when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn't begin there. We tell ourselves that Shakespeare was the son of a woolpedlar, and Napoleon of a farmer, and Luther of a peasant, and we hold up our hands at the marvel. But who knows what kings and prophets they had in their ancestry!

Comparable with Chawcer, yet more occupyed in supersticious and odde matters than was requesite in so good a wytte.

You know, Aretha Franklin can make any old rubbish sound good, and I think she just has.' (After an Aretha Franklin duet with George Michael on 'Top of the Pops'.)

I never did understand the resentment about Country artists 'going pop'. Either you've got what it takes to appeal to a whole lot of people, or you don't.

This evil fortune, which generally attends extraordinary men in the management of great affairs, has been imputed to divers causes, that need not be here set down, when so obvious a one occurs, if what a certain writer observes be true, that when a great genius appears in the world the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come; Knock as you please, there's nobody at home.

Does talent have any need of passions? Yes, of many passions- repressed.

'Jude was fabulous. ... He's great to work with. He's really just a nice guy. ...' Norah Jones [1]

'Jude's uniqueness is that he has the talent of a character actor and the looks of a leading man.' - John Avnet (People magazine, November 24, 2004)

'Jude Law is one of the most handsome men on the planet. He is a character actor struggling to get out of a beautiful body.' - Anthony Minghella [6]

I didn't realise how commercially successful she might be. I thought of her more really, I suppose, in the terms of someone like Joni Mitchell - the level of a lady who's very talented, but would appeal to a more esoteric audience. But she had different ideas.

I'm really looking forward to Kate Bush's return - I'm no expert on her work but I know some of it and I think she's an incredibly original and talented artist. Anyone who writes most of an album like her first album, The Kick Inside, at 15 years old has got to be pretty special.

Her talent was precocious. 'The Saxophone Song' and 'The Man With the Child in His Eyes' were recorded as demo tapes when Kate was still at school. The first album, The Kick Inside (1978), caused tremendous media interest and is still the public's favourite. Her voice, criticized at the time, was small and childlike, the range erratic, if impressive. Since then it has improved enormously, deepening and gaining power and flexibility, until now it is a great asset, individual and capable of both subtle and stunning effects.

My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me that the lamp which I carry does not belong to me, and the song that I sing was not generated from within me. Even if I walk with light, I am not the light; and if I am a taut-stringed lute, I am not the lute player.

'He's an unbelievable player. He's God's gift, something that's going to flash before our eyes and I don't think it's every going to happen again. The only person I can think about he's catching up with is Michael Jordan.' - w:Rashard Lewis[10]

'I played with both Kobe (Bryant) and Michael (Jordan). I would have to say that Kobe Bryant is the better player. Kobe has a much better shot, handles the ball better, and just has more tricks to go along with his game.' - w:John Salley[15]

This has been planned for some time. I guess we'll just have to find someone with an exceptionally round tuit.

We are all born with God-given, unique traits and skills. But as with all possibilities they will remain unrealized unless they are developed, nurtured and put into practice.