Quotes About Craftsmanship

glassblowing?" Noah shook his head. "My

He has the good reporter's gift for being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium. After

You are the boss of your knitting and can do what you like; there is no "wrong" in knitting as long as you are pleased with the results.

Computers force us into creating with our minds and prevent us from making things with our hands. They dull the skills we use in everyday life.

To use a sculptural metaphor, the great novel, essay, biography is imprisoned inside a block of marble and the writer must chip away with a tiny chisel until the exquisite appears

Cheese — milk's leap toward immortality.

A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.

In those days you matched a block of balsa against a rudimentary diagram and got going with a razor blade, which sliced your thumb as readily as it carved the balsa. If the result was recognizable as an aeroplane, you were an expert. If your thumb was recognizable as a thumb, you were a genius.

matched pair of Purdey shot-guns, one of which had not been fired,

Any pipsqueak can roar like a lion on paper, because grand words cost little, whereas delicacy—the delicacy of Chopin for example, persevering to the extreme, tense, elaborate—requires effort and character. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)

Every shift is a work of art.

Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have a grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet.

Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn't see how it worked. 'Slow down,' he said, 'so I can see how you do it,' but she'd laughed and said, 'I can't slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn't do it at all.

I begin to understand you." She nods. "The blacksmith makes his own tools.

There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

They say you had a trade as a blacksmith; is that correct?" Now she will say, shoe a horse? "It was my father's trade." "I begin to understand you." She nods. "The blacksmith makes his own tools.

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Did you know that bone china had real bones in it?" Poppy said, tapping a porcelain cheek. "Her clay was made from human bones. Little-girl bones. That hair threaded through the scalp is the little girl's hair. And the body of the doll is filled with her leftover ashes.

Tatterfell sews on cunning cuffs made from the scales of pinecones around the edges of frayed sleeves. Small tears in skirts are stitched over with embroidery in the shape of leaves and pomegranates and- on one- a cavorting fox. She has stitched dozens of leather slippers for me. I will be expected to dance so fiercely that I wear through a pair every night.

I pass trays of spun-sugar animals, little acorn cups filled with wine, enormous sculptures of horn, and a stall where a bent-backed woman takes a brush and draws charms on the soles of shoes. It takes some wandering, but I finally find a collection of sculpted leather masks. They are pinned to a wall and cunningly shaped like the faces of strange animals or laughing goblins or boorish mortals, painted gold and green and every other colour imaginable.

If it's nice, perhaps the smith will make you a cup that never runs out of wine." Carden gives me a look up through his lashes that I find hard to interpret and rises, too. He takes my hand. "Nothing is sweeter," he says, kissing the back of it, "but that which is scarce.

Nicasia saunters over to where the smith is sitting. She wears a dress of purple that is peacock blue when it catches the light. Her hair is woven in to a braid that circles her head, and at her brow is a chain from which dangle dozens upon dozens of beads in sparkling purples and blues and amber.

From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.