Quotes About Craftsmanship

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it. It allows you to really appreciate the hand of the filmmaker.

I was getting paid to be involved with what I loved more than anything on earth: clothes.

More than anything else, I love to act and leave the rest to my director.

I get an especially acute case of agita at the thought of a mortar and pestle.

Stradivarius, in particular, was the most amazing craftsman and one of the great artists and scientists that ever lived because he figured out something with the sound and the science of acoustics that we still don't understand it completely.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

That is the most important thing to me, what happens behind the closed doors in the studio and makes me an artist.

The most important thing you can do as an actor is bring as much of yourself to the character to ground the character in some sort of reality, and then you build around it and on top of it.

For me, the most important thing is the writing - and certainly the director. But if the writing isn't there, it doesn't matter who the director is!

It is difficult to see why lace should be so expensive; it is mostly holes.

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

The work is at such a high level and is so well executed, it really is a matter of taste... [Source: Project Runway — but consider, applied to the theme of book reviews, it seems apropos!]

A hammer looks like a useful tool to a carpenter; the nail has a different impression altogether.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

And if I've got to die, I want to die an editor.

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.

Is this blasphemy, my lord? I think not. Those who crafted me, be they gods or demons, crafted this mind that shapes my resistance to their schemes. Surely they were wise enough, at the wheel where I was thrown, to anticipate future resistance in the heart they were abuilding.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand-year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.

Everything I write for the first time is written with a pencil.

There's a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death." —Toni Morrison

Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.