Quotes About Craftsmanship

We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.

Repeat the mantra: Writing is when I make the words. Editing is when I make them not shitty.

brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton

Es war ekelerregend, es war sauberste Arbeit, und es verwirrte zutiefst.

The farm's carpenters were true artisans - they had to be to keep all those book from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain.

Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father's iron facts.

Picking had ruined his hands for delicate woodwork.

He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted—it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his finge

Fracti bello fatisque repulsi ductores Danaum, tot iam labentibus annis, instar montis equum divina Palladis arte aedificant

Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered.

the cardinal labor of composition, which is excision…

And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here - the sonnet.

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

The mind writes with a pen, the heart, with a pencil.

what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art

I am here through an error—not in this prison, specifically—but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error—and look, the curio slays the tourist, the gigantic carved bear brings its wooden mallet down upon me.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. Interview in Writers at Work(Fourth Series, ed. by George Plimpton, 1976).

Every great writer is a great deceiver

When you knit, if you get something wrong and keep knitting, then when you discover it, you have to rip out all those rows of stitching to go back and fix it, Life is like that. Sometimes, it has to rip out all the stitches to go back and fix what's wrong.

Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.

Icerideki her sey insan eliyle yapilmis, dunya disaridadir.

It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn't show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs.