There is no spray can called 'Instant Stardom,' only talent can keep you at the top.

When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.

You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure.

There is no spray can called 'Instant Stardom,' only talent can keep you at the top.

You've got to love the villain if you have to play him. You've got to find something that you can live with in yourself if you're going to play the villain in a play on stage.

I remember certain people in the audience laughing and I wanted to ask: 'What are you laughing at? This isn't funny.' Now I realize that laughter can come from insecurity. They don't know how they should be feeling.

A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.

I only travel to good material, a good director and a good company. I won't work in another country for a year any longer, because I have a lovely wife and I adore her and I can't bear to be away from her.

I'm still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it.

We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.

I'd get more applause than some because I was just seventeen. If they didn't clap at the end of my act I would limp off stage and boy would they feel guilty. They would all burst into tremendous applause as they saw this poor cripple kid walking off.

Good acting is consistency of performance.

I'd rather get a good clean laugh with good material, than an easy laugh by swearing or shocking. That's not clever or comedic, anybody can get a laugh that way, it's too easy.

I feel if some kid has sat down and felt I'm important enough to write two pages of words to and take up a lot of his valuable time, then he deserves a few words back, or even a phone call as I have done on a few occasions.

It's a little like casting out hundreds of fishing lines into the audience. You start getting little bites, then more, then you hook a few, then more. Then you can start reeling them in and that's a loveliest feeling - the whole audience laughing with you.

The joy about the recording is that you are your own boss. You don't have a director telling you how to do it.

There is no spray can called 'Instant Stardom', only talent can keep you at the top.

Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.

If you've got talent, stick with it... because talent wins out, without a doubt.

Eric McCormack is directing talent waiting to happen.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

I'm really happy that I got to work with such fresh talent. In a day when record companies are not particularly good at encouraging young, talented songwriters to come forward and get exposure, I think it's important to give tomorrow's songwriters the opportunity.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

My big ears indicated a talent for music. This thrilled me.

You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

Two kinds of men generally best succeed in political life; men of no principle, but of great talent; and men of no talent, but of one principle - that of obedience to their superiors.

God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius.

We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it.

I'll always be there because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.

Ry Cooder for me is a master, a great master that has a wonderful feel for Cuban music. He's also paid tribute my talent a bit, even though I don't know half of what he knows.

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.

Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

But Madonna has a small amount of talent when it comes to movies.

I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano, but I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

Don't show off every day, or you'll stop surprising people. There must always be some novelty left over. The person who displays a little more of it each day keeps up expectations, and no one ever discovers the limits of his talent.

Detroit is full of talent.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Much as I cared for Joseph Kennedy, he was a classic example of that person in the arts with lots of brains and drive but little taste or talent.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as "Soho" poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

I have seen that the American Dream is a reality - and I would love to feel the British Dream is also a reality. To enable that, we have to bring back some common sense and encourage family values, a proper sense of justice and make people believe they have a decent chance to build a business or career for themselves. I see this moment as a fantastic opportunity to restore this, because I believe Britain Has Talent.

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.