Quotes About Craftsmanship

Cash is filling up the holes he bored in the top of it. He is trimming out plugs for them, one at a time, the wood wet and hard to work. He could cut up a tin can and hide the holes and nobody wouldn't know the difference. Wouldn't mind, anyway. I have seen him spend a hour trimming out a wedge like it was glass he was working, when he could have reached around and picked up a dozen sticks and drove them into the joint and made it do.

Thank God there was the gold to forge!

She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality.

Measure twice, cut once

Tokyu Hands assumes that the customer is very serious about something. If that happens to be shining a pair of shoes, and the customer is sufficiently serious about it, he or she may need the very best German sole-edge enamel available—for the museum-grade weekly restoration of the sides of the soles.

You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.

A maker of IDOLS is never an idolater.

Giving your son a skill is better than giving him one thousand pieces of gold.

There are Six Essentials in painting. The first is called spirit; the second, rhythm; the third, thought; the fourth, scenery; the fifth, the brush; and the last is the ink.

Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, "I've always been a believer that if I've got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.

The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.

Yes but he is a man though, don't you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.

they still made the feather tick bust a seam once or twice a month

Die Mauern aus Feldsteinen, die Dächer aus gebrannten Ziegeln, von Maurern gemauert, nicht von Architekten entworfen. Sie kannten die Winde – jedes Haus eine Festung gegen die Überfälle des Mistrals –, kannten die barmherzige und die unbarmherzige Sonne, kannten den Regen und kannten jene, für die sie bauten.

There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.

Good prose is solitary work.

The master swordsman isn't interested in killing people. He only wants to perfect his art.

All my life, I'd thought of having kids with the seriousness that I'd thought of taking a ceramics class. When I finally took one and came home with three beautifully glazed but warped bowls, my husband said: "You're not going to turn into a lady who makes pots, are you?" I was not. I kept the bowls and display them proudly—one holds fruit, one batteries, one loose change—but I had no interest in making anything else.

Beneath the tree an ancient wooden cider press pouring apple juice into cups. The crushed apples fall into mounds of oxidising pulp beside it and the man working the mechanism is shouting something to the craggy plantsman on the next stand with stripling trees for sale.

It's so beautifully made,' she said. 'It's like a Prada shoe.

There are several ways to perform almost any act - an efficient, workable, artistic way and a careless, indifferent, sloppy way. Care and artistry are worth the trouble. They can be a satisfaction to the practitioner and a joy to all beholders.

Handmade and heartfelt; Harriet wanted everything she did to be like this.

hand-crafted chair like an Arne Jacobsen or a Hans Wegner or a Børge Mogensen,' Charlotte goes on. 'Your average Danish home might also have a designer lamp like Poul Henningsen's PH or an Arne Jacobsen AJ from Louis Poulsen. Then

For the rest of us—members of that peculiar, prosaic species classified by Pierre Bourdieu as homo academicus9—dwelling poetically could mean gauging the dimensions of our own habits and mindfully inhabiting the rhythms of our writing lives: taking pride in a beautifully crafted sentence, lingering in the hallway for a friendly chat with a colleague, and working with our neighbors to rebuild our academic habitus into a place of possibilities.