Great Throughts Treasury

"All of these tricks are made of sub-movements ? executive motor functions more granular, the degree to which I can?t quite tell you."

"Any eyes on me - a late-night street sweeper, some dude texting in his parked car, the homeless guy talking to himself - make me feel uncomfortable when I skate. Everyone expects me to do certain things."

"Don?t let anything poison your individuality. Break away & look in, not outward."

"Every trick is made of combining 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 movements."

"How can I expand ? how can the context, how can the environment change the very nature of what I do?"

"I had an infrastructure ? I had this deep layer to draw from."

"I've got issues of non-conformity built into me."

"Skateboarding is such a humbling thing, no matter how good you are."

"I learned to skate in our garage. We lived in the country in Florida, it was sort of farmish, and there was no cement anywhere else. Vert skating was the kind of skating that was done in pools, where you could get airborne and be weightless. The other style, which is what I did, was called free style, which was tricks you could do on flat ground."

"It?s peer respect that drives us."

"Knowing a technology so well that you can induce and manipulate it to do things that it was never imagined to do."

"Take what other people do ? make it better ? give it back."

"The degree to which we connect to a community is in proportion to our individuality."

"The greater the contribution, the more we express our individuality."

"The summation of that gives us something we could never achieve as an individual."

"The Nobel Prize is the tombstone on all creative works."

"What is it that will punch you and make you do something and bring it to another level?"

"There is a beauty in dropping something into a community of your making."

"What makes [my peers] great is the degree to which they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves."

"There?s an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it."

"We take basic tricks, we make them our own and we contribute back to the community in a way that edifies the community itself."

"You have to let the cognitive mind rest back a little and let the intuition go."