These tricky quotes will inspire you. Tricky (of a task, problem, etc.) requiring care and skill because difficult or awkward; or deceitful or crafty.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging tricky quotes, tricky sayings, and tricky proverbs.
Inspirational Tricky Quotes
- “Ideas aren’t magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.” ~ Lynn Abbey
- “It gets really tricky giving advice. The older I get, the less advice I give.” ~ Anne Heche
- “Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.” ~ Donella Meadows
- “What I find sometimes that is tricky is if actors are using too much of their own life in a picture, in a scene, they get locked into a particular way to play the scene, and it lacks an immediacy.” ~ Tom Cruise
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“Advice is such a tricky thing when you’re young.” ~ Jena Malone
- “This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem – and in particular to perform integration – you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.” ~ Marvin Minsky
- “Art is very tricky because it’s what you do for yourself. It’s much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.” ~ Maya Lin
- “The trick of making movies in this culture is how to not give up everything that makes them worthwhile in order to get them made – and that’s a tricky balance.” ~ Alex Winter
- “Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition.” ~ Juan Cole
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“The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time – and central to the concerns of fiction.” ~ Penelope Lively
- “I felt a little green because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.” ~ Neil Patrick Harris
- “I used to hang out with Salvador Dali a lot. He was such a nice man. I really liked his wife Gala, too. People say that she was tricky, but she was never difficult with me.” ~ Jerry Hall
- “No matter what, it is very tricky and difficult just to be a good parent at all. I have a lot of help. And for that I’m very grateful.” ~ Jennifer Garner
- “And my parents’ separation was tricky. But my mum had always been really honest with me and treated me like an adult even when I was really young, so I knew they hadn’t been getting on.” ~ Lisa Snowdon
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“What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.” ~ Lillian Hellman
- “The subject matter is very tricky. It’s about the Munich massacre and what Mossad did afterwards with the assassination squads. I think it’s a turning point in history, especially for the Palestinians.” ~ Daniel Craig
- “People want change but not too much change. Finding that balance is tricky for every politician.” ~ Eleanor Clift
- “The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.” ~ Leo Burnett
- “People teach their dogs to sit; it’s a trick. I’ve been sitting my whole life, and a dog has never looked at me as though he thought I was tricky.” ~ Mitch Hedberg , Tricky quotes on life
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“Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.” ~ Adrienne Rich
- “It’s incredible how nature sets females up to take care of people, and yet it is tricky for them to take care of themselves.” ~ Bjork
- “I’ve learned that life is very tricky business: Each person needs to find what they want to do in life and not be dissuaded when people question them.” ~ Eli Wallach
- “There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It’s tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don’t think conceptually while I work on a first draft — I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar. But there’s one thing I’m sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” ~ Stephen King
- “Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.” ~ David Foster Wallace
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“I try and make all my songs sound different from each other while doing it in a way that’s still me. It’s a tricky thing to do.” ~ Cher Lloyd
- “It’s tricky when I’m constantly traveling and adjusting to new time zones and trying to also keep up with my workouts.” ~ Joe Manganiello
- “So I have the classic amateur’s technique; I know some very tricky bits and I have large gaping holes.” ~ Bill Bruford
- “My own idea about 3D is that it is there to enhance the viewing experience but I don’t think that you have to use it in a tricky way, I think that the minute you sacrifice story and character for something coming out of the screen, I think you’ve lost it.” ~ David Yates
- “Paul’s One Way Out is a fresh, intelligently arranged, and satisfyingly complete telling of the lengthy (and unlikely) history of the group that almost singlehandedly brought rock up to a level of jazz-like sophistication and virtuosity, introducing it as a medium worthy of the soloist’s art. Oral histories can be tricky things: either penetrating, delivering information and backstories that get to the heart of how timeless music was made. Or too often, they lie flat on the page, a random retelling of repeated facts and reheated yarns. I’m happy to say that Paul’s is in that first category.” ~ Ashley Kahn
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“Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.” ~ Sylvia Plath
- “(existing’s tricky: but to live’s a gift)” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I find historical figures in general very tricky because you feel at times that you’re serving two masters. Not only the arc and wonderful writing that comes with the show but also the history of a person’s life.” ~ Vincent Piazza
- “Humanizing good people is kind of boring and I don’t really see the value in it… humanizing tricky characters is exhilarating, and making audience films out of indie subjects excites me.” ~ Jason Reitman
- “This leads to a question – if a great many people are for a certain project, is it necessarily right? If the vast majority is for it, is it even more certainly right? This, to be sure, is one of the tricky points of democracy. The minority often turns out to be right, and though one believes in the efficacy of the democratic process, one has also to recognize that the demand of the many for a particular project at a particular time may mean only disaster.” ~ Frances Perkins
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“Notes are tricky in an audition because I find, more often than not, my instinct is right.” ~ Lance Reddick
- “One of the tricky things about running a TV show is that you just never know how good the guest stars you cast on a weekly basis, how good they’re going to be in the episode. Sometimes they surprise you in good ways and sometimes they surprise you in disappointing ways.” ~ Shawn Ryan
- “Success is tricky to deal with, both professionally and in your personal life.” ~ Ewan McGregor
- “Notes are tricky in an audition because I find, more often than not, my instinct is right. If they have a preconceived notion about the role and it goes against my instinct, unless it makes sense to me, it often throws off what I’m trying to do. Though sometimes they have an insight that I don’t because they’ve been living with the script. I don’t have one feeling or another about notes, but it is always a little bit of a red alert when I get one in an audition.” ~ Lance Reddick
- “I’m quite ignorant about fashion and I’m colorblind, so it’s all a tad tricky. My only knowledge of that world comes through Christopher Bailey, whom I first met in 2008 when I did a campaign for Burberry that featured musicians, artists, actors and sportsmen.” ~ Eddie Redmayne
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“Managing university finances is very tricky business. We’re nonprofits. We’re not supposed to accumulate large surpluses.” ~ Rick Levin
- “It’s obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.” ~ Elon Musk
- “Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are – these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky because now we are dealing with things that are zero-sum.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action.” ~ Immanuel Wallerstein
- “There may be certain genres that men dominate, but fiction not so much. The question of prizes is tricky because there are so many prizes.” ~ Emma Donoghue
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“Ambition is a tricky little animal to tame. It is very skillful at concealing itself from its master.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Having done Spaced, I can’t even remember it being that difficult on Spaced, but we know what the end’s going to be like. We know why we’re putting in this amount of work, or why a shot might be particularly tricky because we know that what we do is create a whole package. It’s the writing, the performances, and the style of camerawork, that’s what we’re working toward, and we’re prepared for that.” ~ Simon Pegg
- “I think it’s something that the citizenry needs to be vigilant about – participating in democracy, and that includes issues like what’s going on and how much secrecy and transparency there should be. That’s an ongoing thing – in a democracy you want checks and balances and oversight, but you need a covert agency to protect the country. It’s a very tricky balance and I think it changes as the world changes and I think we all need to be mindful of that.” ~ Matt Damon
- “I’ve gone through various periods with superheroes. They work in the right hands, but they don’t work in other hands. It’s tricky. But any movie is tricky. It’s impossible to say, ‘This is what you do in any situation.” ~ John Carpenter
- “Tricky the paths a long love might follow, like the spiral down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.” ~ Kevin Barry , Tricky quotes about love
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“I don’t have any tricky plays. I’d rather have tricky players.” ~ Abe Lemons
- “The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.” ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke
- “I regard each sentence as a little wheel… Now and again I try to put a really big one next to a very small one in such a way that the big one, turning slowly, will make the small one spin so fast that it hums. Very tricky, that.” ~ Roald Dahl
- “I’ve lived in Forest Hill Village, Riverdale, Summerhill, The Annex and Cabbagetown. Finding the right neighborhood fit in Toronto is only slightly less tricky than finding the right partner to share it with.” ~ Andy Barrie
- “That’s the tricky thing these days: being able to surprise people.” ~ Joseph Kosinski
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“TV writing is tricky to navigate because you have so many different personalities – the actors, multiple producers.” ~ Roger Avary
- “TV writing is tricky to navigate because you have so many different personalities – the actors, multiple producers.” ~ Roger Avary
- “No outward thing – nothing, nobody from without – can hurt me inside, psychologically. I recognized that I could only be hurt psychologically by my own wrong actions, which I have control over; by my own wrong reactions (they are tricky, but I have control over them too); or by my own inaction in some situations, like the present world situation, that need action from me. When I recognized all this how free I felt! And I just stopped hurting myself.” ~ Peace Pilgrim
- “Elijah Wood confirms his standing as the foremost actor of his generation. …Wood acts so eloquently with his sentient face and searching eyes that his job becomes one of concealing how redundant his spoken lines are – a tricky job he largely is able to bring off commendably.” ~ Jay Carr
- “I once said to someone when I was playing Lady Macbeth and they said: “That’s tricky, emotionally, what do you do about murdering your husband’s cousin?” And there are, of course, things that aren’t in your personal repertoire that you have to somehow understand by reading or watching other things and listening to other people talk about them.” ~ Judi Dench , Tricky quotes to understand
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“No way construction of this tricky plan was built by other than a greater hand.” ~ Emily Saliers
- “I once said to someone when I was playing Lady Macbeth and they said: “That’s tricky, emotionally, what do you do about murdering your husband’s cousin?” And there are, of course, things that aren’t in your personal repertoire that you have to somehow understand by reading or watching other things and listening to other people talk about them.” ~ Judi Dench
- “Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they’re going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, ‘Why am I out there looking for directors?’—because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, ‘I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier.'” ~ Nora Ephron
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“Men are in general so tricky, so envious, and so cruel that when we find one who is only weak, we are too happy.” ~ Voltaire
- “You hope people won’t be tricky or miserable. If you’re in public life, it’s important not to be. If someone says, ‘I like your programme, thank you,’ you should be grateful. I am. Why be nasty?” ~ Alan Titchmarsh
- “For me – showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively – well, that’s what it’s like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time.” ~ Donna Tartt
