George Steiner Quotes

You could be a music prodigy at age 4, like Mozart, but you can't be a writing prodigy.

Early genius, like early cabbage, does not head well.

Almost everything about the universe is astounding. I think the most amazing thing is how gifted we are - we are only monkeys who came down from the trees just recently. We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running.

People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine.

If children are not introduced to music at an early age, I believe something fundamental is actually being taken from them.

Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.

There's this Bruno Mars guy. I met him in Hawaii when was doing Elvis imitations at the age of about five or six years old. There's a lot of old school in him. He's got a depth that I just love.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I always knew I was brainy. It struck me when I was a child that I wanted to be an adult because I never felt I belonged among children whose minds were so much simpler than mine.

There are lots of different interpretations of the word 'prodigy.' My own is of someone who is talented and tries to help other children. So in that respect I could be called one, although I don't think I'll go off the rails.

Once I had learnt my twelve times table (at the age of three) it was downhill all the way.

School work and intellectual interests such as music and the arts were not especially important to me while I was growing up, although mathematics, my favorite subject, was fun. Baseball was my first passion: I played sand lot and Little League and rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

I skipped kindergarten because I was reading at a pretty high level. That's a weird and cocky thing to say, but I was real sharp, and I knew that early on.

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

I was very much on the mathematical side, where you probably do your best work before you're forty-five. Having passed that significant date, I thought I would do something else.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

My older brother was a musical prodigy, and he got a scholarship to the Bronx House Music School. We moved to the Bronx when I was 4 to be close to his music school. Then I got a music scholarship myself, at the age of 6, but that was for a school down in Greenwich Village. I had to take the elevated train and then the subway to get there.

I was born at the age of twelve on an MGM lot.

Child prodigy is a curse because you've got all those terrible possibilities.

To be called a genius at 17 or 18 years old can sometimes cause arrested development.

I've always been interested in exploring the concept of child prodigies. When I was younger, I wrote a story about Mozart as a child, and I just always loved this idea of young people who are able to take control of their lives and bring a whole lot of change at such a young age.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that.

This may sound strange, but at a very early age, at around 3, I was aware that I was smarter than the other kids.