Quotes About Craftsmanship

I love watching Samuel L. Jackson do anything, but for me, Gary Oldman is the grandmaster of the game.

Japanese people can feel some attachment in what they are making, whether it is a car or a TV or a computer.

I'll say it, I love working with actors, I'm a fan of actors. They bring so much, and they can also break a movie, but when it works I give it all to the actors. I'll say it, I think that 'The Transporter' is great not because of my direction, it really is great because Jason Statham was great in it.

The reality is that I spent years in the factories in Italy when I first set up Jimmy Choo. Today, everyone who has a job at Jimmy Choo, I've done their job - right down to the cleaner.

Every so often I'll hear writers say that there are other writers they would read if for no other reason than to marvel at the skill with which they can put together the sort of sentences that move us to read closely, to disassemble and reassemble them, much the way a mechanic might learn about an engine by taking it apart.

Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

My liberators in Silicon Valley have freed me to write for you directly and to say what I want to say to anyone I want to say it to. The Internet and its innovators are doing more to facilitate the reemergence of content-laden, craft-rich, hands-on art, individuality and perhaps even spirituality, than all the galleries, agents, critics, churches and publishers combined.

Vermeer's skill was in combining few colors, mixing little and using layers of lakes and varnishes to build up the illusion of life

Wax was good. Wax was soft. Wax couldn't shatter like china. Wax was as beautiful as china.

A young apprentice applied to a master carpenter for a job. The older man asked him, "Do you know your trade?" "Yes, sir!" the young man replied proudly. "Have you ever made a mistake?" the older man inquired. "No, sir!" the young man answered, feeling certain he would get the job. "Then there's no way I'm going to hire you," said the master carpenter, "because when you make one, you won't know how to fix it.

The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception and spirit and design he is hardly below even the poet

A clever tattooist produces artistic work, creativity in living with knowledge and insight to his craft.

Do you have a preference?" Tillaume could manufacture dozens of varieties of tea from the simplest of starting points, blending and making what he considered ideal. "Whatever." "My lord. There is great importance to tea. It should never merely be 'whatever.

over the quilt work of the beautiful spread

She stripped off the leather coat she'd worn to bridge, and he hung it on an elaborate yet unique coat tree next to some built-in bookshelves that were so extensive his living room almost resembled a library—at least on that side. Ariana guessed he'd put them where the staircase used to be. The new staircase was made of wrought iron and was no longer against the wall. "I love your shelves," she said. "Thanks. I built them myself.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

We are born makers. We move what we're learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands.

The precision of a filmmaker is like the precision of a surgeon.

My favorite quotes; "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector." - Ernst Hemingway. "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." Ernest Hemingway

When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, "Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." [ Letter to Harrison Blake ; November 16, 1857]

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.