Quotes About Craftsmanship

There are people who can sit down and write a song about any given subject, and they can do it really, really well.

For other comics, it's about full-spectrum dominance, being on panel shows and having one-liners and being a good chat show guest and having a good seven minutes you can do on 'Live At The Apollo.' But I really think about these subsequent finished pieces, you know? And they don't always chop up well into one-liners and routines.

Mature roles full of substance the kind played by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino - my favourite actors - is what I want to do.

What gets people into trouble with records now is that they want to build something up without substantial musical ideas. Without that as a foundation, you can add all the layers of sound you want - it's still going to sound like a mess.

I get really excited when I see filmmakers make something that is subtle and feels real. It is really tough to do right.

I'm almost sometimes too subtle in my acting.

Really, subtlety is what is really important to me and my work.

I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.

Everywhere I go, I always look for creative entrepreneurs, whether it's artisans and craftsmen, small farmers and gardeners, or restaurateurs who use fresh, locally sourced ingredients. I admire the courage and self-reliance it takes to start your own business and make it succeed.

Without passion, all the skill in world won't lift you above your craft

Collaboration is how most of our ancestors used to work and live, before machines came along and fragmented society. Time to plant the fields? Everybody pitched in and got it done. Harvesttime? The community raced to get the crops in before the rains came. Where were those crops stored? In barns built by teams of neighbors. In the cities, the same spirit applied. Anonymous craftsmen spent their lives building cathedrals that wouldn't be completed for generations.

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it Autograph your work with excellence.

All forms of art demand a discipline that is not unlike praying. That lays a pipeline between the art & the truth.

It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.

Of course, drinking is an art, like lots of other things.

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.

Rare and powerful harmonies exist, Shaping both scent and contour in a flower. Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until, Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond. And thus do images of fleeting vision, Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky, Once turned to stone live on from age to age, Held always in a faultless, polished phrase. ("A Sonnet To Form")

It was difficult for me to write, and not just because my hands were rough and my fingers so permanently bent around the handle of a pick and axe that unbending them was unbelievably difficult. I managed to wrap a thick rag around pen and pencil to give them the thickness of a pick or shovel handle.

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience. Of

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

I have always striven to fix beauty in wood, stone, glass or pottery, in oil or watercolor by using whatever seemed fittest for the expression of beauty, that has been my creed.

It seems reasonable to expect that beauty will emerge from a fusion of the individual character and culture of the potter,with the nature of his materials.

I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.