"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me"."
— Erma Bombeck

"Hide not your talents, they for use were made,
What's a sundial in the shade ?"
— Benjamin Franklin

"Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads."
— Erica Jong

"The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. "
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"According to this law [the law of Dharma], you have a unique talent and a unique way of expressing it. There is something that you can do better than anyone else in the whole world--and for every unique talent and unique expression of that talent, there are also unique needs. When these needs are matched with the creative expression of your talent, that is the spark that creates affluence. Expressing your talents to fulfill needs creates unlimited wealth and abundance."
— Deepak Chopra

"Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage."
— Russell Brand (My Booky Wook)

"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents."
— Eric Hoffer

"I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, ‘If only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she’d be so much further along!’ But I was wrong about that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I’ve seen my share of people like that. At first you think they’re amazing. Like, they can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. you think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them. They’ve been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they’ve been able to play things well without any effort and they’ve had people telling them how great they are from the time they’re little, so hard work looks stupid to them. They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required or character building. It’s a tragedy."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings."
— Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."
— Stephen King

"A familiar name on its own, however, does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work."
— Daphne du Maurier (The "Rebecca" Notebook: And Other Memories)

"Not many people can lay claim to having broken Time, and we did it purely by accident."
— James A. Owen (The Search for the Red Dragon)

"Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever."
— David Foster Wallace

"Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The world loves talent but pays off on character."
— John E. Gardner

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)

"...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent."
— Benjamin Zander

"There is art in my fingertips,
a poem in my head,
a song brushing past my lips,
a piano being fed.

A mic waiting to be held,
a pen waiting to be used;
Waiting for the perfect hand
and a voice to be felt.

This is: EMOTION"
— Melinda Pitkin

"A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito Almanza declares: ‘I am convinced that all of photography depends on the moment we press the release […] I believe that you’re a photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.’ In making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: ‘[…] sometimes I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn’t begin in the dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger.’"
— Clive Scott (Spoken Image)

"If it [talent] isn’t strong enough to take the gaff of real training, then it’s not worth much."
— Andrew Wyeth

""Listen," Mac interrupted, "you still have to knock it out of the part. But it's a degree-of-difficulty thing. You're doing a triple lutz and she's skating. You're the Sasha Cohen here.""
— Zoey Dean (Almost Famous)

"'Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?' He answered, 'Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.'"
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

""Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love." "
— Laura Kasischke

"“It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.”"
— Ross Wetzsteon (Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960)

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing"
— Mary Robison