Quotes About Craftsmanship

An actor is somebody who communicates someone else's words and emotions to an audience. It's not me. It's what writers want me to be.

I feel like an emperor only when I'm writing.

Our idea is simply to play the songs and to emphasize our musicianship.

I worked as an engineer before going into ceramics, making insulators. It was my job, so I got it done. But I also had a lot of pride in myself.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

Acting is never done. We're trying to keep it real and make sure that you're entertained and it seems unrehearsed.

I think that there's a difference between being an entertainer and being an artist.

There are entertainers and there are musicians, and I never was an entertainer.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

Qué quiere decir? —se extrañó Dalmau. —Pues que mientras unos respetan nuestro trabajo y nos encargan piezas y diseños, y confiemos que sigan haciéndolo, Gaudí se dedica a recoger los desechos de fábricas y talleres para recubrir las obras con eso que él llama trencadís, un mosaico mal ensamblado de piezas rotas y restos desechados de cerámica, vidrio y porcelana.

The Creator is not a careless mechanic.

One great difference between good writing, that readers overlook, and bad writing, that they fail to notice, has to do with the number of rewrites and revisions usually required by the former. It isn't at all easy to write clear, declarative prose—transparency evolves from ruthless cutting and trimming and is hard work—while lumpy, tangle-footed writing flows from the pen as if inspired by the Muse.

It's no delay to stop to edge the tool.

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

Take this single tree. They could cut it down and make half of it into an incense tray, decorate it with lacquer set with gold or silver filigree, and set it in an alcove of an aristocrat or man of high rank as a tasteful ornament. The other half they could make into wooden clogs for stepping through the mud. When you look at the two different shapes, one is admired while the other is considered mean, but they're the same in terms of the cutting down of a living tree.

Even when I work with computers, with high technology, I always try to put in the touch of the hand.

Su ánimo pérfido se expansionaba sobre todo con la cocina. Era excelente cocinando, ya que no le faltaba ni prontitud ni fantasía, cualidades principales para una cocinera.

It's not for reading. It's for making. I make things with books. I make objects. Yes, artworks: statues, pictures, whatever you want to call them. I even had a show. I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them. A book is a good material to work with; you can make all sorts of things with it.

I am a writer, not a transcriber.

As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.

Thus use your frog…. Put your hook through his mouth, and out at his gills;… and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of your hook; or tie the frog's leg, above the upper joint, to the armed-wire; and in so doing use him as though you loved him.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

They liked black ironwork here on Pyrites. They made everything out of it. Even the beer, judging by the taste.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art." —Leonardo Da Vinci