A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place. Penalty, one stroke.

- Richmond Golf Club in Surrey, England (1940)

via

Because there’s nothing as perfect as the initial idea. And the only reason I write and direct is to protect the writing, because that’s what’s most precious…

You can be as good as anyone that ever lived. If you can read, you can learn everything that anyone ever learned. But you’ve got to want it.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/man-at-his-best/q-and-a/ricky-gervais-interview-0212-2#ixzz1kyRHVsfZ

- Ricky Gervais, Esquire Magazine

Soccer is, in other words, both romantic and tragic, and the soft agony of a bad game is an inescapable part of this. You spend all your time hoping something will happen, and it never does. You get a surge of adrenaline every time the ball flies anywhere near the goal, and you’re always disappointed. But then, every once in a while, James McFadden will score from 30 yards at the Parc des Princes to give Scotland an impossible 1-0 lead over France, and a ponderous game will go all kinds of nervous-breakdown crazy. And for fans it’s practically an out-of-body experience — not just because it was a great play, but because it was so unlikely that this match could have been graced with a great play to begin with.

- Brian Phillips, via Grantland.com

- Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted…

- Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity…The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

- If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.

Amen.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

- David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College commencement address

We are bludgeoned with snapshots of cats playing polo. We are pinioned with pics of people we hardly know.

We hardly have time for great because we are so besieged (and besotted) by the deluge of daily dreck.

There is greatness in the world. Greatness and originality. In art and in work.

But we’re too busy looking at shit (and in looking at shit proclaiming that “everyone is a photographer”) to notice.

- George Tannenbaum, Ad Aged

The interesting thing with Facebook is that, with 500 to 800 million of us connected around the world, it sort of devalues information and devalues knowledge. And this isn’t the comment of some reactionary who doesn’t like Facebook, but it’s rather the comment of someone who realizes that knowledge and new ideas are extraordinarily hard to come by. And as we’re more and more connected to each other, there’s more and more to copy. We realize the value in copying, and so that’s what we do.

And we seek out that information in cheaper and cheaper ways. We go up on Google, we go up on Facebook, see who’s doing what to whom. We go up on Google and find out the answers to things. And what that’s telling us is that knowledge and new ideas are cheap. And it’s playing into a set of predispositions that we have been selected to have anyway, to be copiers and to be followers. But at no time in history has it been easier to do that than now. And Facebook is encouraging that.

- Mark Pagel, Infinite Stupidity