If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you'd be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here.

Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.

cracked, and then another,

Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.

Conceit spoils the finest genius.

But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.

Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.

Genius is childhood recovered at will.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.