Measuring how hard your team is working by counting the number of hours they work or what time they get in and leave is how amateurs run companies.
Every week, as an 11-year-old kid, I would tune in to what was really the first American Idol-type program, a radio show called 'Major Bowes' Amateur Hour.' The winning group on the evening of September 8, 1935, was called the Hoboken Four, and their spokesman was Frank Sinatra, then aged 19.
Thanks to a hacker known as Guccifer who wormed into the computer of the 43rd president's sister, the world has learned that George W. Bush is an amateur - I would say serious amateur - painter.
I'm not going to be a guy that retires and keeps coming back. When I'm gone, I'm gone. Same thing as amateur wrestling; when I won the world championships in Olympics, I left and I never went back. Same for pro.
You count a man's U.S. Amateur titles after he starts winning professional majors. That's something any intelligent golf writer with a sense of history is supposed to know.
The New York Times Bestseller 'The Amateur,' written by Ed Klein, former editor of the 'New York Times Magazine,' is one of the best books I've read.
I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it's whenever I feel there's something to be put on paper. I don't care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night.
I read a lot of 'Nancy Drew' books as a kid and considered myself a bit of an amateur detective.
I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading. So I made an economic decision, and it turned out the best judgment I ever made in my life.
The fact that I could secure an opera engagement made me realize I had within me the making of an artist, if I would really labor for such an end. When I became thoroughly convinced of this, I was transformed from an amateur into a professional in a single day.
You just have to play it cool. You don't want everyone to know you're an amateur.
My father and my uncle used to be amateur monologuists because their generation grew up with Henry Irving and the like, and they had that style of delivery, of declamation: 'The Belllllls!' What we call 'ham' now, larger than life.
I can remember 1987 when I had my first amateur fight in Michigan, weighing 64lb. I was 10 years old. I was the youngest and smallest guy on my team. I can remember what I ate. There was this restaurant called Ponderosa, and my dad made me eat a steak. I was happy. It was a first round knockout. I slept with my trophy for two weeks.