Quotes About Craftsmanship

But after a little while I got used to the tedium, understanding that these parts of my work were as essential to the arabesques of the final pattern as the rest bars are to a symphony.

The design of each element should be thought out in order to be easy to make and easy to repair.

Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.

Babel werd nooit moe zijn verhalen te herschrijven. Hij zei dat er in een volzin ergens een soort hefboompje zat waarop je de hand kon leggen om er een heel kleine, maar precies goede draai mee te geven, niet te veel, niet te weinig, waarna alles op zijn plaats viel.

Si un libro es bueno, el escritor también ha de serlo.

You must want it enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like. – Phyllis Whitney

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Third: Act first, explain later. Stamp this axiom on your writer's brain. Or put it on a note and tape it where you can see it. This advice never fails.

Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets 'are both made and born'. That all great writing has to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that 'second heat', their laboured revision.

A perfume is a symphony, the sum of the parts, where the whole is far greater than the individual. And yet, excellence stems from individual effort. The artist intuitively understands this circular relationship, and therefore selects only the best ingredients. —DB

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

What's real is always worth it,' she explained to me. 'Look how it's made.' She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. 'You'll wear it your whole life.

Unlike sitting at a computer screen, printing is very direct and hands-on.

Unlike writing a book, which can take several years, baking is instant gratification.

Balenciaga taught me everything I know. He taught me to care for the details, that it was not necessary to sew on a button where it had no use or to add a flower to make a dress beautiful... no unnecessary detail.

Usually, if you notice good cinematography, then the cinematographer's failing. I try to make light feel like it's always motivated and natural in some way and hope that the lighting goes unnoticed.

Cars are a fairly unpleasant thing to have to draw.

I wore Armani Prive to Cannes, and that was incredible. The craftsmanship is something I never understood until I wore it: the structure, the integrity of the fabrics, the colours, how things photograph.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

I enjoy mending leaking pipes and dodgy plugs, as it helps me to unwind when my mind is on something else. Im pretty good at it - no one has ever been harmed by one of my repairs.

I recently took up ice sculpting. Last night I made an ice cube. This morning I made 12, I was prolific.