A Quote by Natalia Ginzburg

You aren't ill: it is just that you are made of second-rate materials

Natalia Ginzburg

Quote Topics

Ill Just Made Materials Rate Second Second-Rate

Quote Author

Natalia Ginzburg
Italian - Author
July 14, 1916 - October 7, 1991

You aren't ill: it is just that you are made of second-rate materials.

Natalia Ginzburg

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.

Sarah Waters

I knew Id always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, Well, Id rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one.

Sarah Waters

There is no room in music for the second-rate - it might just as well be the nineteenth-rate.

Gustav Holst

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

Willa Cather

But I think that sometimes, when one's behaved like a rather second-rate person, the way I did at breakfast, then in a kind of self-destructive shock one goes and does something really second-rate. Almost as if to prove it.

Alison Lurie

World class is a phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment events, as well as a wide variety of insecure individuals, to assert that they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are.

John Ralston Saul

If you go to a second-rate place, and you are first-rate, it is very difficult to do first-rate work because you do not get that critical feedback you need for first-rate work on a daily basis.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

If a company is second rate, the logo will eventually be perceived as second rate. It is foolhardy to believe that a logo will do its job immediately, before an audience has been properly conditioned.

Paul Rand

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Abraham Maslow

But no work from a first rate mind is ever really second rate.

Gerald Finzi

Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?

Maurice Ravel

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

Clive James

If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?

Joseph Heller

It's a very obsessive profession that you need to stay obsessed to get anywhere, and it's very easy for us to get obsessed and then nothing else matters. I was reading Somerset Maugham's novella, Moon and Sixpense, about this artist based on Gauguin's life. It was so beautifully written. You must be first rate because second rate you might not survive. If you're an accountant, you'll survive second rate. If you chance it big, you may not get anywhere.