Quotes About Craftsmanship

Mr. Bentley - He builds fast trucks.

If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse.

Art is a car, kitsch is a horse.

If you restore a car, and you're making money, then you're doing it wrong.

I am a brush, the car is my track and the artist my canvas

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

Dolores seems to dwell only just inside language, she makes sentences the way a potter works clay, squashing them any which way into shapes that please her.

And then he raised the welder to his face and flicked the switch.

Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.

You can sit down and spend hours crafting some joke that you think is perfect, but a lot of the time, that's just a waste of time," Ruby explains.

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

The hands of the artificer," Paul said, "had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves.

He was interested in only one thing: turning out the best job he could, with the skill he possessed.

Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don't work as well as they might.

It's important to put it like that: not "I am a writer," but rather "I write stories." If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant. Your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

Anything that was associated with human workmanship and human thought was surrounded by Shadows.…

It was just as Dr. Relf had described it to him, but finer than he could ever have imagined. The thirty-six pictures around the dial were minute and clear, the three hands and the one needle were exquisitely shaped out of some silver-gray metal, and a golden sunburst surrounded the center of the dial.

The present Mr. Parslow was teaching his son the craft; the two of them and their three workmen would scramble like industrious termites over the scaffolding they'd erected at the corner of the library, or over the roof of the chapel, and haul up bright new blocks of stone or rolls of shiny lead or balks of timber. The

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with their liberal allowance of time.

clatter of a typewriter suggests that you're actually building something.

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't—I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere—but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.

If you write a phrase and think, 'Wow, that's really poetic, that's really pretty, I really nailed it,' you get rid of it [because] you've overdone it.