Quotes About Craftsmanship

The written English we want is clean, clear prose. I choose my words carefully – not elegant, not stylish, just clean, clear prose. It means simplifying, polishing and tightening.

The craft Emmys are kind of the kids' table at Thanksgiving. You're not really invited to the big dance. It's still really, really exciting, and the statue still counts.

Clarimonde sitzt am Fenster und spinnt. Fäden, lange, dünne, unendlich feine Fäden. Sie macht ein Gewebe daraus, ich weiß nicht, was es werden soll. Und ich kann nicht begreifen, wie sie dies Netz machen kann, ohne immer wieder die zarten Fäden zu verwirren und zu zerreißen. Es sind wunderliche Muster in ihrer feinen Arbeit, Fabeltiere und merkwürdige Fratzen.

Schrijven is stratenmaken: op je knieën liggen en achteruit kruipen.

Once you have mastered the craft, you can use it for whatever purpose you choose.

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

Do everything by hand, even when using the computer.

If [hand-drawn animation] is a dying craft, we can't do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era.

Along with a career, four children and a husband, she bakes and cooks, sews, preserves, sings, embroiders, gardens, arranges flowers, decorates cakes, and makes kayaks and pottery.

Writing is a physical art. And writing a book is a lot more like making a complex sculpture out of bronze than writing a whole bunch of reports. What's in your head does not count, not for sculpture, not for book writing. Pencil on paper is what matters. Words on paper, pages and pages, chapter after chapter.

A cast-iron stove overflowing with decoration costs less than a plain one; amidst the surging leaf patterns flaws in the casting cannot be seen.

Locked up eighteen years, without even a television set or a newspaper. Needlework might seem pretty important if it was all you could do.

Sabía exactamente qué madera quería, pero no decía simplemente "Me gusta el roble" o "Me gusta el arce". Sabía que quería la madera cortada en perpendicular a los anillos del árbol, y que tenía que estar cortada en invierno, idealmente en enero, para que tuviera el mínimo contenido en savia y azucares. En las reuniones, un montón de arquitectos con el pelo canoso nos mirábamos entre nosotros y pensábamos ¡Madre mía!

But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.. the kind of detail that turns an ordinary product into an artifact

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.

Like a kettle, a lever, a lathe I have used you.

professional

You see, more than a simple matter of putting down words, writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write.

That which is written without much effort is seldom read with much pleasure.

We're lucky. Most of our men are good story men. In fact, they have to be. A fellow who's a good artist, but isn't good at telling a story in this form ... in continuity form ... can't really work for us.

I don't think people have made staples by hand since the fifteenth century.

take either forty-eight or eighty-four pages to