The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for Inspirational. Inspirational is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspirational is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

"Amateur and expert

More than anything, he wanted to return to the house with the same look of peace that he'd seen on Pastor Harris's face, but he trudged through the sand, he couldn't help feeling like an amateur, someone searching for God's truths like a child searching for seashells.

Kate Chambers, amateur sleuth in "Ground Truth: A Pittsburgh Murder Mystery," believes that "One drink sharpens your wit, two drinks makes you a philosopher, three or more drinks just makes you stupid.

You couldn't be satisfied with being an amateur asshole, could you, Jimbo! You had to go and turn pro on me!

Amateurs sit and wait for Inspirational, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

Sport must be amateur or it is not sport. Sports played professionally are entertainment.

Amateurism is the strongest form of discrimination in sports. Because it discriminates against the underprivileged it discriminates against the poor. If we want sports to go back to the wealthy let's make it amateur again.

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Two weeks ago at the U.S. Amateur my mom caddied and that is kind of a different feeling because she's your mom and you have to listen to her. It was really comfortable having my mom there but it's also really relieving and comfortable to have someone that knows the course off their hat really.

The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.

I'm 0 for 3 with marriage - the scoreboard doesn't lie never has. So what we all have is a marriage of the heart. To sully or contaminate or radically disrespect this union with a shameful contract is something that I will leave to the amateurs and the Bible grippers.

When I look at a lot of older stuff that I've written I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.

My main objective is to prepare candidates for professional baseball however the majority of our graduates will go home as much better qualified amateurs.

I've returned to being an amateur without any ties or strings attached which gives me a freedom I never had before.

If you decide to design your own language there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls.

I'm not supposed to be able to speak clearly and decipher what's going on in the media. I'm supposed to be the typical amateur who's 22 and scared to death and can't believe he won the Olympics.

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.

Although my family - parents and sister - all work in the personnel management business their real passion is performing amateur operatic societies and so on.

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

Your performance depends on your people. Select the best train them and back them. When errors occur give sharper guidance. If errors persist or if the fit feels wrong help them move on. The country cannot afford amateur hour in the White House.