Quotes About Craftsmanship

When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine.

Oboe - an ill woodwind that nobody blows good.

Modern poets mix too much water with their ink.

Quality, not quantity, is my measure.

I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami.

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that; one stitch at a time taken patiently, and the pattern will come out all right, like embroidery.

Trifles make perfection - and perfection is no trifle.

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

That's not writing, that's typing.

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

Our dedication- devotion- to craft should enlighten as it humbles us.

that whole fussy room still carried an atmosphere of having been crocheted into existence rather than carpentered.

The answer, of course, was that the stories had been written as well as could be expected given the tools I had when I wrote them. Every writer starts with the same toolbox, which at most might contain a screwdriver and a pair of rusty pliers, and there's not much you can make with that. Each finished story adds a new tool to the box that assists in the construction of better stories going forward, and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the prior work.

Your book is bloated and self-indulgent

The writing part is always the hardest part of filmmaking. Almost anyone can direct—they won't necessarily direct well, but the machinery works—you can take someone off the street and put them with an experienced crew and the movie will get made. But writing can't be faked. It doesn't run itself. It has to be worked out very specifically, word for word, image for image.

Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form. [ Letter to Max E. Feckler , Oct. 26, 1914]

You see it in the many bouncing clothes that are not just pleats. To make them, two or three people twist them - twist, twist, twist the pleats, sometimes three or four persons twist together and put it all in the machine to cook it.

I still love a well-crafted joke. Twitter's been great for that.

Editing is really like plumbing a good deal of the time. You put two things together, and a current runs through it.

No matter what type of equipment you have, you still have to have a certain talent to be able to make a good record.