Quotes About Craftsmanship

A man who works with his hands is a labourer. A man who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. A man who works with his haands, his head, and his heart is an artist.

Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad.

A jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.

If there was an ethos at Squid Frames, it came from the elevation of craft. When a piece of wood was stained and finished particularly well, eyebrows were raised but little was said. The type of things that would score the most admiration were precisely the things that others would not recognize at all, because when the frames were well made, the eye would simply travel to the art.

The more I baked, the more I realized that the recipe was the least of my concerns. Far more important were the techniques, which were difficult to explain in a step-by-step format precisely because they depend on touch and feel.

He told me that when he went away on vacation for a couple of weeks he could lose the feel of the dough. It took a day or two to get it back. "I usually measure how good I am by how quickly 'it' returns," he said.

They devised such useful tools, skills, and techniques as the potter's wheel, the wagon wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the arch, the vault, the dome, casting in copper and bronze, riveting, brazing and soldering, sculpture

To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.

You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.

I don't know how a woman can have such a poor view of herself as to show off poor stitching.

the doorkeeper's feet are seven armlengths long five oxhides for his sandals ten shoemakers worked on them

I have twenty acres of trees to care for. And I'm a wood-carver. You thought they were weapons?" Peter

as Flannery O'Connor put it, "In the act of writing, one sees that the way a thing is made, controls and is inseparable from the whole meaning of it. The form of a story gives it meaning which any other form would change."6

I have a great horror of shams on the stage--of what will not bear close inspection--of what is not real. I never use spangles, tinsel, and cheap theatrical glitter--it offends my artistic sense. I always employ hand embroideries in bullion and silk, and will have nothing to do with the generally used appliqué embroideries on the stage, and I have found that what is the best always has the best effect, whether looked at from a distance or near at hand.

Every time I see Anthony Hopkins I think that, to some extent, he has just been getting away with it all these years.

Good software, like wine, takes time.

In the editing room, 20 percent of the time you're using stuff from before the actor knew the camera was rolling or you're taking a line from somewhere else and putting it in his mouth.

Instead of using brushes all the time, try a palette knife to paint.

I think anybody who has been in the theater, prefers it. Television is a... factory. You turn out things on a revolving assembly line. You don't have time to perfect anything in television.

As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.