You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.
Interpretation
Talent is inherent, but it requires effort to reach its full potential.
Gore Vidal's quote highlights the idea that while talent is an innate trait that each individual possesses, it is essential to cultivate and refine that talent to achieve excellence. It suggests that improvement and success depend not only on the talent itself but also on the dedication and work put into it.
In practice
In a motivational speech to students about the importance of hard work and skill development.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Those dreams I have at night are going to drive me crazy. Last night I dreamed that little red-haired girl and I were eating lunch together... But she's gone... She's moved away, and I don't know where she lives, and she doesn't know I even exist, and I'll never see her again... And... I wish men cried.
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we are in hot water!
Jesus. Low-Key Lyesmith," said Shadow. and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. "Loki," he said. "Loki Lie-smith." "You're slow," said Loki, "but you get there in the end." And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and the embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.
Even after many years, kata practice is never finished, for there is always something new to be learned about executing a movement.
We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.
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