Quotes About Craftsmanship

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.

N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

People who seek to serve the community end up falsifying their work, she wrote, whether the work is writing a novel or baking bread, because they are not single- mindedly focused on the task at hand. But if you serve the work— if you perform each task to its utmost perfection— then you will experience the deep satisfaction of craftsmanship and you will end up serving the community more richly than you could have consciously planned.

Nine Tailors Make a Man.

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement? Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth.

That's the thing with handmade items. They still have the person's mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone.

The patron saint of Viking could not stand editors who claimed to have discovered an author. "The author is not a discovery," Huebsch always insisted. "The author is the discoverer." Maybe so, but I still maintain that it is the editor who has to dig out the pearl in the sand pile and clean it up.)

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

Acknowledge beauty when you see it. Even if its appearance disturbs you, surely you can admire the skill that went into its design.

and a chocolate brown woolly

All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful... If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There's a constant balance between those two.

Amateurs try to write in one go; professionals draft and draft again.

I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.

I love how the sewers express their vision. They all have their own personalities, and that's what they bring to the room.

I mean everyone, from Al Pacino to Murphy Guyer, are phenomenal actors.

I think that Phil Kaufman is one of the best directors that I have come across.

My respect for animators and animation directors has gone way, way up and it is just not something you can phone in.

I've never liked the word 'celebrity.' I like to photograph people who are good at what they do.

I see what sound engineers do as like painting. A good artist could paint that table so that it looks nothing like a table, or it looks like a photograph of a table. Engineers do that with sound.

A still photographer is a mechanic. He's not an artist, despite all you read.

I really had a great time shooting for Dabboo Ratnani. He is such an experienced photographer and works in perfection.