Quotes About Craftsmanship

Carpentry is a young person's sport. It builds you up physically for the first few years, then starts tearing you down.

He is a woodworker; I'm a carpenter. We both work wood, but the way we approach it, and the tools we use, differ greatly.

We should be better craftsmen of our own lives.

Then, again, there are three things which every artificer must possess if he is to effect anything,—nature, education, practice. Nature is to be judged by capacity, education by knowledge, practice by its fruit.

words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.

had he been only a hardworking craftsman all his life, fitting colours together as a labourer constructs a building out of stones?

Scott Adams: From him, I learned how to write a three-panel comic. Probably the best pure writer on the comics page.

I will not let the non-knitters of the world decide how normal I am.

Knitting is still trying to teach me That no matter how well you knit, looking at your work too closely isn't helpful. It's like kissing with your eyes open: nobody looks good that close up.

Really, there are only two kinds of people who are going to understand about hand-knit socks: those who wear them and know the singular joy of perfect socks, and the knitters who have the pleasure of giving that exquisite experience. Everybody else thinks you must be a special kind of crazy to spend so much time making something that you could buy for $1.99 at the store.

I'm reasonably sure that Calvin Klein does not knit.

When it is all over, when the socks are done, a knitter will have invested an average of twenty thousand stitches in the name of love and warm feet, knowing full well that the socks will wear out.

100 years ago, buying something you could make was considered wasteful; now making something you could buy is considered wasteful. I am not convinced this is a step in the right direction.

I will resist the urge to underestimate the complexity of knitting.

I will not let the non-knitters of the world decide how normal I am.

...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

Art is sometimes likened to a mirror... an expression of universal human truth, executed with a degree of skill.

When I say that I'm a businessperson and a dressmaker, it's the truth. I run a business, and I make dresses, I make blouses.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

What we were doing wasn't about being really good musicians," Lewis says. "It always seemed to me it was about making a song. We're just making a song.

Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist's urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world.

Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it...

As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.