Quotes About Refinement

The misfortune is that many people, men and women, think that the perfect face has no flaws, no pores in the skin; and that gives unrealistic levels of esteem. Somebody feels they're not right because they haven't got that type of refinement.

One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life.

Elegant writers depict intricacy with simplicity.

It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

Conciseness in art is essential and a refinement. The concise man makes one think; the verbose bores. Always work towards conciseness.

Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.

If you work at something, you get better at it.

To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

As CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, we used a concept called 'search and reapply,' which meant that if we found better ways of doing something, then we would do it.

Novel writing, like so many things in life, is an iterative process. You come at it again and again, working at it like you would a piece of pottery or a stone sculpture, chipping away the parts that don't make sense, smoothing over the rough edges.

He who stops being better stops being good.

If I can be dead honest with you, when I first see the script for a new episode of 'Endeavour,' if anything jars, I say, 'What's this? Has it got a place in our story?' And if it hasn't, it has to go.

With a woman of sophistication, class and modesty and refinement, I become a totally tongue-tied buffoon. I can't even look her straight in the face.

We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away." –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry French writer, author of The Little Prince

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry