Quotes About Craftsmanship

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.

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

Art history is so often about looking at the people who made the art; but I realized at that moment there were also stories to be told about the people who made the things that made the art. My

A novel is something that stands at the end of a lengthy process called writing. It is not a preexisting Platonic form embedded within the writer... I do not have a Boston marathon inside me waiting to get out. The marathon is a peak experience I am rightly entitled to only as the culmination of years of regular training and love of running.

Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?

And then there are painters who never do anything that is no good, who cannot do anything bad, just as there are ordinary people who can do nothing but good.

Pure in mezzo a difficoltà finanziarie sento che niente è più solido di un mestiere manuale.

If you want to be an authentic writer, learn to tell the truth, to wrestle with it, to reflect on it, and then to write about it with great care. And great humility.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture.

The Plains Indians decorated their moccasins with not less than three different colors of quills. Their favorites were yellow, red, green and purple. Beaded moccasins had a larger range of colors, the average being four or five, and the preference was white, red, green, yellow and blue. The background color, almost exclusively, was white, although the Assiniboin tribe used blue for the background color.

Indians made necklaces out of practically anything that took their fancy. Eagle and grizzly bear claws were prized by them because it required much skill and daring to get them.

Quality is pride of workmanship.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

A line will take us hours may be; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

We were put on this earth to make things.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them. I don't write autobiography.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

It is the highest form of culture and craftmanship in art to use local materials. That way you stand a chance of adding to culture. The other way you are in danger of merely imitating it.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.