I go through phases sometimes: 'I'm a genius; they get me,' and sometimes I'm like, 'Why does anyone want to hear me?'
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye's best lyrics match Dylan's prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali.
Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.
As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright's genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.
Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.
It should be quite clear that it is possible for unpleasant people who are small in various ways other than in their artistic genius to produce great art. Art and morality have no necessary connection.
Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
JR was a 1-dimensional, evil character. JR was multi-dimensional, and Larry Hagman is probably one of the greatest actors that we have. Then, you go back and look at 'I Dream of Jeannie' - I mean, he's a comic genius, as well. So, I think they should give him an honorary Emmy Award.
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
The genius of America is that we are still a land of undiscovered shores, and we are at our best when we open our hearts and allow the night winds to bring renewed visions of great deeds.
A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.
Ataturk approved of the mevlevi dervish approach to God as being 'an expression of Turkish genius' that reclaimed Islam from what he saw as hide-bound, backward Arab tradition.
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
President Obama's view of a free economy is to send your money to his friends. My vision for a free enterprise economy is to return entrepreneurship and genius and creativity to the American people!
It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
I do not consider myself a literal genius.
The dread of criticism is the death of genius.
Music looks very formidable to people outside of it and it looks like it's this realm of spooky genius.
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
I wouldn't use the word 'scared' for my role as Hitchcock, but it was my most insecure. Taking on such a formidable, giant personality such as Hitchcock; he was one of the great geniuses of world cinema. Sheer genius.
To know one's self is wisdom, but not to know one's neighbors is genius.
I do love the clothes on 'Mad Men' because my character has been so elegant and I would never have had access to these clothes. I think Janie Bryant is a costume designing genius. They'll call and tell me, 'It will only take an hour,' and I'm like, 'I will try on the whole truck!'
No one will ever be as good as Phil Hartman. He was such an amazing genius, and may be the best sketch performer of all time.
My husband wrote me love letters while I was on location in Canada and pregnant. They turned into being about food, and it turned it into a cookbook. He called it 'The Tuscan Cookbook for the Pregnant Male.' It was kind of genius. When I took it a book agent, he was like, 'Men don't buy cookbooks.'
The critic is genius at one remove; he is not unlike an actor on the stage, and incarnates in his mind, as the actor embodies in his person, another's work; only thus does he understand art, realize it, know it; and having arrived at this, his task is done.
Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.
When I started out in the duck-call business, my college buddies would come in and say, 'Robertson, you have a college degree. What are you doing?' Then they drove away saying, 'What an idiot!' Thirty-five years later, they're saying, 'The sucker's a genius!'
During this earlier period of his activity Voltaire seems to have been trying - half unconsciously, perhaps - to discover and to express the fundamental quality of his genius.
And indeed if you think you're a genius at something, what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
What seems like a crazy idea today eventually grows. It's a 'with hindsight' thing. One day, someone will turn around and say, 'That was genius.'
Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.