Quotes About Craftsmanship

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

There's something special about writing by hand, writing with a fountain pen, and there's something special about writing into a book, to take a blank book and turn it into an actual book.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.

Flaubert complains in a letter to Colet, "What a bitch of a thing prose is! It's never finished; there's always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for

You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing—grinding, buffing, and polishing—not writing.

Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature.

Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.

The] artisans [...] men whose chief interest is their craft and not the market place.

Oh, you've made plenty of short stories long. But never, ever, have you made a long story short.

Clothes should be as interesting on the inside as on the outside. Even if you enjoy it totally alone, it's important.

Karl Lagerfeld never touched a pair of scissors in his life.

All bronzes are made to be touched. Bronze is a sensual 'living' material. The sweat and oil of your palms adds to the patination.

I like manual things, doing things with my hands, the feeling of touching.

You must be very creative in our business. Creating in this business is making something new, but it is also touching on something old.

All of my work stems from the simplest of ideas that go back to the earliest civilizations: making clothing from one piece of cloth. It is my touchstone.

I like to see the world from different levels. Even when I'm making a candle or designing a piece, I like to sit on the floor to polish or make it from scratch. I haven't seen really tough times, but my husband has come up the hard way. He has even seen poverty.

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.

The connect that I have with the audience comes from my hard work and sincerity towards my craft and also because of the opportunities that I have had. I have been able to engage with my audiences. They observe my performances minutely. They think I will do some magic on screen. They like me because I don't do over-the-top acting.

Whether it's a photograph or a piece of clothing, a leather bag or a film, I tend to gravitate towards simple, beautifully made, quietly lovely things. They make me happy.

The town I came from really had one industry, and that was furniture.