“If you’re a salesman, you have to deal with yourself the way you are. Not how you’d like to be. If you don’t have what it takes, you can waste a lot of time asking yourself “How can I get what it takes?” The question you should be asking yourself is, “Is there something else that takes what I have to offer?” Because if there’s something you can succeed at, just the way you are, you won’t have to waste a lot of time trying to change yourself. Which you’re never going to be able to do, anyway.”

“He only tells the story once but you see it from about 8 points of view, you have to pay attention the whole time to see whether something seems to be true or is just what somebody says is true.”

“Instead of asking yourself how you can change that aspect of you, maybe you should be asking yourself why you were created that way. For what purpose do you exist the way that you are?”

“Sometimes my mother did practice but one thing led to another and sometimes she did not. The advice of the homely man was something of a curse. She would not practice at all if she could not practice right so that gradually she played less and less and sometimes not at all.I used to think that things might have been different. Gieseking never played a scale and Glenn Gould hardly practiced at all, they would just look at the score and think and think and think. If the homely man had said to go away and think this would have been every bit as revolutionary a concept for a Konigsberg. Perhaps he even thought that you had to think. But you can't show someone how to think in an hour; you can give someone an exercise to take away.”

“Instead of asking youself how you can change that aspect of you, maybe you should be asking yourself why you were created that way. For what purpose do you exist the way that you are?”

“But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way I can take this personally.”

“Always be yourself. There is nothing else you can be. How can you be not yourself? How could you be something else than what you are?”