Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.

There is nothing noble in being superior to some other person. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.

Proverb

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

Richard Russo

This is the great thing about Northern Ireland. I walk down the street and people stop me and say things like, 'I know you. You're that wee golfer, aren't you?' I say, 'Yeah, that's me.' They say, 'Keep it up, wee man.' It's very funny and that's why I want to stay here as long as possible.

Rory McIlroy

When in doubt, mumble when in trouble, delegate when in charge, ponder.

James H. Boren

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

We may need to change the way we think. As in Israel, I think there should be a mandatory draft, where you go away for the service of your country for three years.

Steven Tyler

Long since, the desert wind wiped away our footprints in the sand. But at every second of my existence, I remember what happened, and you still walk in my dreams and in my reality. Thank you for having crossed my path.

Paulo Coelho

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

James Joyce

My work in the House of Representatives, at this time in my life, is completed. It is time to return home.

J. C. Watts

In antiquity there was only silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.

Luigi Russolo

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

Richard Hofstadter