Quotes About Craftsmanship

The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.

Der Bildhauer steht zunächst dem rohen Block, der puren Materie gegenüber, die jede Möglichkeit umschließt. Sie antworten dem Meißel; er kann zerstören oder Wasser des Lebens geistige Macht aus ihr befreien.

La sera perfeziona l'opera grezza cominciata al risveglio, a cielo ancora buio. La sera smussa, dà l'ultima mano di cartavetra fina al giorno fatto a mano.

They never returned. Only the old were left. And they began to die off. Those who did not die left the village by other means. In the end there was only one widow left, a dressmaker, and she began to sew the visages of those who had vanished. She hand-stitched the bodies and the clothes; she perfected the faces. Each and every doll was a precise replica of someone who once lived there.

Handwriting is a spiritual designing, even though it appears by means of a material instrument.

Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft.

Beauty is less important than quality.

This is practice. And practice is all I want out of art.

She talks to herself as she hollows out a stoneware bowl. She is saying something about containment. She talks to her dogs and to the chickens. She has said so many things that have gone unheard. Off the record. Mother:

Whenever a tool is handled with ease and with a minimum of false motions, so that it will produce accurate and satisfactory results, it is handled in the right way. The constant aim of every carpenter, especially the apprentice, should be to eliminate false motions in everything he does." — Carpenter's Tools, H. H. Seigele

It takes eight to nine months for a Berluti client to get a pair of custom-made shoes and it's fine. I was always against see now/buy now, as I don't think it's relevant to what we do and is not a good image of luxury.

I would buy Barbies and take them apart and then remake their looks. I used them for hairstyling. It was a whole process. I had a lot of dolls - like 150.

I've had a great love for Al Pacino's work since I first saw him on the stage doing 'The Indian Wants the Bronx' in the early '70s. His work is remarkable. He's the real thing.

You see one scene shot 25 times in one day, which is totally fascinating, but while you're watching it, you're remembering, 'This is what I was thinking when I was writing that part of the book,' and so it brings it all back very gradually as you're working.

I love anything by Joan Didion. Incidentally, she was one of the local moms when I was growing up in Point Dume. She always reminded me a little bit of my mother, so I feel a great affinity. I love the precision of Didion's writing. There's a construction and a craftsmanship to her sentences that's imbued with so much emotion.

Cutting into color reminds me of the sculptor's direct carving.

Stop-motion is sort of twitchy; you can feel the life in it. If we were to remove that completely, there'd be no point in it.

You know, I write songs, I repair guitars.

The hardest part is writing a song as a story. A song is so short and there are only so many words that every line has to hit. The words have to flow. You can't say certain words that sound weird next to each other, you can't repeat words too much.

My very first products were hand-made, one-of-a-kind pins. When I finally realized I could repeat a phrase to make multiples, 'intellectuals gone bad,' a fairly succinct description of my own life, seemed appropriate.

Filming is repetition and many takes.

It doesn't really matter what someone's hair looks like or if the sound is perfect. Every director who's made a couple of movies knows that, because you can replace the sound. Or, like, any one shot is not that important, because they all add up together.

I think listeners are hungry to hear quality.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.