Quotes About Craftsmanship

Cheap work is seldom, if ever, valuable. Usually, it's just cheap.

Actors are journeymen. We show up for work. We do the job and then we go. What goes on behind the scenes is what goes on behind the scenes.

One of my strengths as a writer is that I'm a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.

I love writing, and I love postproduction. That's great, because you start to reassemble the film, and you sit there, and you start to really put the film together, finally. The shooting of it is the most stressful part of the process.

It's really fun to just stretch out and not have any boundaries or just try something for the craft.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

It really is the very top of the fashion world; nothing comes above haute couture. But not any old designer can create something magical and call it haute couture; the term is strictly protected for a very special few.

That's the only way to do it. Just like an actor. You can get a great performance if you do a bunch of takes and edit it. You find the moments and string them together.

I was getting bored and, I think, being a real pest. I remember Brando coming and sitting on the bed and cutting out the most exquisite paper fish, with detailed scales and fins. Then he took a hotel pen and a piece of string and made a fishing pole.

All gut strings. That's just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, it's the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.

I needed a capo - a clamp to hold down the strings - so my daddy made me one out of a corn on the cob and a rubber band.

Like, when I write a song, the song comes first before production. Everything is written on an acoustic guitar so you can strip away everything from it and have it be equally as entertaining and good without the bells and whistles.

I was drawn to bakery and pastry. It's the same discipline you employ in dance - you take the instruction, and you keep on practicing, seeking perfection. You never achieve it, but you strive.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

I think for me to be involved in a festival, there has to be a strong element of songwriting and musicianship.

Hand-drawn animation is something that I feel really strongly about. A Pixar movie may be really great, but it looks like it was drawn by a machine.

I strongly believe in the art form of the album.

Writing can flow out when I'm feeling something strongly, whether that's joy, pain, fear, desire or anything else. The challenge is actually later, in the second or third or 100th draft of the music, when it can be so easy to cover up the original sentiments by making the music more ornate or cloaked.

I started seriously applying myself to writing fiction immediately after I finished graduate school. By 'seriously,' I mean that, instead of noodling along on a story, finishing it or not as the mood struck me, I set out to complete what I started, to polish it to the best of my ability, and to send out the finished story.

First, there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament, but are clearly revealed, a charm felt in Japanese architecture.

What I wanted to create with 'The Luminaries' is a book that had structural patterns built in that didn't matter, but if you cared about them, you could look into the book and see them.