Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.

Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.

So, creatively, I was doubly blessed: constant relocation and parental disharmony. Add to these two gifts the well-established fact that many of the world’s greatest geniuses, both artistic and scientific, have been the product of serious maternal deprivation, and I am forced to the conclusion that if only my mother had been just a little more emotionally inadequate, I could have been HUGE.

To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hardworking people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Genius is childhood recovered at will.

Genius is the ability to look at things simply.

It has often been observed that the mothers of great men, and especially of great divines, have been remarkable for strong mind and force of intellect. Mothers have been found, as a general rule, to influence children's character far more than fathers.

A genius is just a mentally ill person with an audience.

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features.

Genius is the aptitude for seeing invisible things, for stirring intangible things, for painting things that have no features.

A genius is someone who discovers that the stone that falls and the moon that doesn't fall represent one and the same phenomenon.