“I don’t believe in this ‘gifted few’ concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing. They have a way of getting good at whatever it is.”
Charles Eames
more infosource: 100 Quotes by Charles Eames, ed. by Carla Hartman and Eames Demetrios (Eames Office, 2007).
category: creativity, passion, talent
medium: Nonfiction
“One of [Steve] Jobs’s many gifts was that he knew what to give a shit about. He knew how to focus and prioritize his time and attention. Grass stains on his sneakers didn’t make the cut.”
John Gruber
more infosource: “Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot,” Daring Fireball, October 6, 2011.
category: priorities, Steve Jobs, talent
medium: Blog
“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.”
Ernest Hemingway
more infosource: describing F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 125.
buy on Amazon
category: butterfly, F. Scott Fitzgerald, pattern, talent
medium: Memoir
“Without faith, talent is a fugitive thing.”
Alexandra Styron
more infosource: Reading My Father (New York: Scribner, 2011), 81.
buy on Amazon
view on Google Books
category: faith, school of life, talent
medium: Memoir
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. II (New York: Picador, 2007), 266.
buy on Amazon
category: discipline, endurance, love, luck, talent
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 91 of The Paris Review, 1984.
“I wrote somewhere that the poet at fifteen wants to be as great as Dante; by twenty-five he wants to be in The New Yorker.”
Donald Hall
more infosource: “Coffee with Robert Graves,” in Unpacking the Boxes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008), 116.
buy on Amazon
category: fame, perspective, poet, recognition, talent
medium: memoir
“Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She’s beautiful; when you’re with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she’s been gone for years, you will see her on the arms of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.”
David Benioff
more infosource: City of Thieves (New York: Penguin, 2008), 162.
buy on Amazon
view on Google Books
category: mistress, talent, unpredictable
medium: fiction
notes: As quoted by the character Kolya from his own work-in-progress novel, which he refers to, misleadingly, as Ushakovo's novel The Courtyard Hound
via: Linda Lee!
talent