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Exlpore more Skill quotes
"Tengo had a gift for such work. He was a born technician, possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the game."
"It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish."
"To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery."
"Not many abilities are inherent. Most are acquired through patient practice, and those that are inherent are enhanced and utilized through practice too."
"If a craftsman wants to do good work, he must first sharpen his tools."
"I learnt the theory of movement, which I still teach sometimes. I was very, very ambitious to learn a skill."
"I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction, and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God, and not by your own effort, transfers the thing to our heavenly home--where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction, but it leaves you naked and bankrupt."
"You only need enough experience to master the art."
Explore more quotes by John Shirley
"Weekends are a bit like rainbows; they look good from a distance but disappear when you get up close to them."
"I get drunk writing words. I don't drink or do drugs, but I get so carried away with writing that I get inebriated from it."
"Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine."
"I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic."
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