But most of all, I like Monaco's attention to detail, his capacity for taking pains.
If genius is "the infinite capacity for taking pains", it wouldn't seem to leave much time for anything else.
If genius is indeed an infinite capacity for taking pains, the Japanese are in a class of their own.
For ordinary mortals our research requires only a finite capacity for taking pains, which ought to be compatible with a normal home life.
It is a painstaking process: if genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains, then Ivor certainly qualified for the title.
Solheim sat down and, having identified the problem, applied logic and technology to it; because he was also a genius in his infinite capacity for taking pains, he solved it.
The narrator tells us that Kear "saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Charles Dickens in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains"—the same word that Maugham applied to himself in "The Summing Up" ("I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed").
In the office of the immediate future, every body is doomed to keep moving up & up, into jobs of greater & greater complexity & responsibility, until at last every man is hard at work at a point well beyond his capacity for taking in what he's doing.
Personally, I feel that he lacked that component of genius, the infinite capacity for taking pains, and that his films, paintings and books fall apart at the seams because he couldn't quite be bothered, or because he couldn't quite work out what he ought to be saying.
The narrator tells us that Kear "saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Charles Dickens in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains" — the same word that Maugham applied to himself in "The Summing Up" ("I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed").
