John Dryden Quotes

The entertainment industry is loaded with extraordinarily talented people. But the true, genuine originals, they're rare.

Steve McQueen is a genius. And I think that word is overused, but I think with Steve it's rightly used. He's a genius.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

I'm not saying I'm the best. There are many painters in the world. But there is only one Picasso.

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.

There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness.

Genius appeals to the future.

Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?

I invented magic stuff; it came very easily. Now, I sucked at everything else, but I was good at magic as a kid.

A genius is a man who does unique things of which nobody would expect him to be capable.

Amadeus Mozart is to music something like Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was to literature. They are people who created something that nobody before them had. Absolute geniuses. You can recognize their harmonies among thousands.

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

Each man has his own batch of poems.

Poets are far rarer birds than kings.

I could not but smile to think in what out-of-the-way corners genius produces her bantlings! And the Muses, those capricious dames, who, forsooth, so often refuse to visit palaces, and deny a single smile to votaries in splendid studies, and gilded drawing-rooms--what holes and burrows will they frequent to lavish their favors on some ragged disciple!

I think Tony Fucile, who did the illustrations [for Bink & Gollie], is an absolute genius. I've never met him.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.

Perhaps only a Genius can truly understand Genius.

You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius.

People who are great thinkers, in science or in art, people who are great performers, have to have that kind of capacity. Without that kind of capacity, it's extremely difficult to manage a high level of performance because you're going to get a lot of extraneous material chipping away at the finery of your thinking or the finery of your motor execution.

Works of genius are the first things in the world.

Peter had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing.

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.

In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.