Quotes About Craftsmanship

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

Living in the world of the workshop, which I do as a teacher, you have to be articulate about craft. And that often involves imposing analysis on work that's in a pretty raw state.

A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

Comedy is not funny. Comedy is hard work and timing and lots and lots of rehearsals.

The songs that you work and work and work on sometimes are just forced and not as good.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

Expensive quality work doesn't cost more - it pays.

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle.

It's always great to work with masters, people who are really, truly good at what they do.

If you work with amazing actors, you've got a master class happening in front of you. But [also] it's just acting at the end of the day.

The best work I can do is to take myself as much as I can out of it and get it as simple as I can.

In fact, all kinds of men, and not merely architects, can recognize a good piece of work.

There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman; and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

I want to be known for good work first. A good story and good delivery is just that - period.

More people now work in the arts than the steel, coal and car industries combined.

Working with [Kyle Chandler] in the scene was like playing tennis. You work with really talented actors, I think they make other actors look really, really good.

I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.

The illustrators work so much harder on the books than the writers do. I mean, that's so much work doing what they do, and it's terrible for them.

I like doing things where I can get dirty, work with my hands, and use power tools. Last weekend, I did some grouting.

I work very hard on getting the songs as direct and examined as I can before I go in the studio.

I have to admit to not being the greatest technician, but stop motion animation gives me licence to create machines that wouldn't otherwise be possible - inventions that seem real and actually work.

I will promise you that if I can give you two good scenes -- which is what I always try to do in every movie -- then I feel like I'm doing my job.