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"Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever."
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"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."
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Personal Development
"We are capable of greatness."
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Personal Development
"It takes nearly as much ability to know how to profit by good advice as to know how to act for one's self."
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Personal Development
"If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored."
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Personal Development
"Those who can't, try: those who can, don't have to."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Talent can be a nice thing to have sometimes. You look good, attract attention, and if you're lucky, you make some money. Women flock to you. In that sense, having talent's preferable to having none. But talent only functions when it's supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off, or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like the dew at dawn. If talent's the foundation you rely on, and yet it's so unreliable that you have no idea what's going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have?"
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Personal Development
"We are all capable of being great dreamers."
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Personal Development
"The Army has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability."
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Personal Development
"I Kenneth Robert Livingstone, having been elected to the office of mayor of London, declare that I take that office upon myself, and will duly and faithfully fulfil the duties of it to the best of my judgement and ability."
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Personal Development
"I loved living and breathing theatre so much that I decided I had to find a way to bring my desire to act and my ability to support myself together. I'd run through the possibilities in Washington, so that meant moving to New York."
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Personal Development
More
"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
Art
"The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."
Society
"She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it."
Emotion
"There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone."
Art
"The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all."
Focus
"I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art."
Art
"I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
Education
"It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned."
Literature
"The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush."
God
"Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient."
Ethics
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