Quotes About Craftsmanship

You have to hammer yourself into an artist.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm.

Novels do not drop ready written from the skies. Your couple of hours' reading is my half year's work.

La gravure sur pierres fines a atteint son apogée pendant l'Antiquité. La Renaissance et les Temps moderne n'ont pas égalé, en tout cas pas surpassé les produits anciens qui sont parvenus jusqu'à nous.

I think it is highly likely that – with some differences – everything has already been written. But the fact is that, in literature, the what doesn't matter: what matters is how. Originality in literature does exist, and we can find it – basically and maybe exclusively – in how we write, not what we write about.

There is no question that the style is more important than the subject matter.

Good pictures require more than good lighting.

Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.

You know, that's a really beautiful bow," Neverfell interrupted suddenly. "Did you make it?" "Found it, mended it, modified it," was the curt reply.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.

I make my own pants because I don't wear jeans. They are like golf pants. I just like to put a little funk into everything.

When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.

But I do wish some of these young reporters had the opportunity I had to work more closely with editors who could help them shape a story and make it better. "They still get edited, but not the way I worked with editors every step of the way on a story—it was the way we all learned the craft in those days. Today we just don't have that many people.

You're not going to hear me do a rap song, you're not going to hear me do a jazz song. We have to be true to our roots, do what we do, and try to do it a little better each time.

Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and--prayer.

I'm drawn to furniture design as complete architecture on a minor scale.

Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

Today I'm wearing a light-blue Savile Row hand-tailored suit, Lilly Pulitzer tie, Hermès pocket square in the breast pocket, and Bedfordshire bespoke shoes custom made by G.J. Cleverley's lead craftsman on Old Bond Street. I

I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing… is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this — the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.

Young ladies sketched, did watercolors, wrote short paragraphs of imaginative prose. To Alexandra, there was a distinct and distasteful difference between one who paints and a painter, one who writes and a writer.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

Whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul.