Quotes About Craftsmanship

These can never be true friends: Hope, dice, a prostitute, a robber, a cheat, a goldsmith, a monkey, a doctor, a distiller.

You should hammer your iron when it is glowing hot.

Shoddy pay—shoddy work!

It reminds me what Uma Thurman once said about actors improvising: "What most actors call improvising is just stammering and swearing. But another word for improvising is writing. And that's not what you pay actors to do.

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

I have made bouquets of pleats, bouquets of flowers, bouquets of ruffles, bouquets of feathers. Often I design in mousseline, held tightly around the waist, and with something else going on all around.

Good scripts have always been, I think, hard to find. Good storytelling, good writing - it's just not easy. I have made it a point that - if I'm going to put the energy into doing this work - I will wait until I find something I'm really happy with.

I made some salt and pepper shakers a while back and waited three years for them to come.

Glass really rewards risk. A lot of times with glass, you're just waiting for the piece to cool down or for some temperature to adjust, and there's split seconds where you've got a fraction of a second where you get to make a move a particular way, and you don't get to repeat it if you do it wrong.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

You've got to wake up and perfect your craft, every day, and at the end of the day, you know, you get the star power, magazines, photos shoots, but you've got to say humble, you've got to stay grounded.

You wake up white, and you think about certain things every day. You wake up black, and you think about certain things. You wake up Chinese, and you think certain things - but those things aren't major. What's major is that you are good at your craft.

Jiro Ono serves Edo-style traditional sushi, the same 20 or 30 pieces he's been making his whole life, and he's still unsatisfied with the quality and every day wakes up and trains to make the best. And that is as close to a religious experience in food as one is likely to get.

The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker have been around a lot longer than supermarkets and Wal-Mart.

There was a lightbulb moment as soon as I walked in the kitchen and started working. I love the physical action. I love the whole idea of feeding people and bringing people together over food. I love the craft involved.

I have often called attention to the fact that walking through the streets in the Middle Ages was a different experience from nowadays. Right and left, there were house facades that were built out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of the person who had made it.

Daniel Day-Lewis is my favorite actor walking the planet right now. He never ceases to amaze me.

You spend so much time developing a character when you do a film; so much of your work is done before you get set to shoot because you've been working on the character: the way he walks, the way he talks, what might upset him, what might make him happy.

As the editor-in-chief of the do-it-yourself magazine 'Make,' I've met scores of dedicated makers. They come from all walks of life - rich, poor, young, old, male, female, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative.

If you get hold of a head of hair on somebody you've never seen before, cut beautiful shapes, cut beautiful architectural angles and she walks out looking so different - I think that's masterful.

I know it looks like Burt walks through his movies, but he doesn't; he works hard to make it look that way, and the work is tough.

I collect traditional Aubusson tapestries that you can hang on a wall. The last lot I bought were from an antiques fair in London.

There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part.

I just try to keep making good records, try to write songs the best way I can and take my job seriously. Like most people take their jobs.