Quotes About Craftsmanship

The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

There is a considerable amount of manipulation in the printmaking from the straight photograph to the finished print. If I do my job correctly that shouldn't be visible at all, it should be transparent.

TV is a deformed vision, an excessive caricature. A chef has to stay an artisan, not become a star.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

She was a master cake baker and her creations were not just oohed and ahhed over by other kids at my birthday parties, but requested by those kid's mothers for their own celebrations... She not only accepted any request I made, but far exceeded my own ideas as to how it might look. She was an artist who sculpted in cake and painted in frosting.

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands...

It's fun to take a pile of raw materials and make something out of them. The more demanding the work, the greater the satisfaction.

She watched and taught the girls that sang at their embroidery frames while the great silk flowers grew from their needles.

tongue-in-groove walls

Irenée Calfat was a potter. She took hunks of clay and turned them into exquisite works. She'd pioneered a new way to glaze her works and was now sought out by potters worldwide. Of course, after they'd made the pilgrimage to Irenée Calfat's studio in St Rémy and spent five minutes with the Goddess of Mud, they knew they'd made a mistake. She was one of the most self absorbed and petty people on the face of this earth

The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.

A Master Craftsman of Acting, like Daniel Day-Lewis, spends years selecting, preparing, and acting for just a single film. He is not like Nicolas Cage who always just plays Nicolas Cage in every film.

You should put time into learning your craft. It seems like people want success so quickly, way before they're ready.

All art is but imitation of nature.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

For Nina and Nathaniel, it's all about the end product—pouring it on pancakes and waffles. But to Caleb, the beauty is in the way you get there. The blood of a tree, a spout, and a bucket. Steam rising, the scent filling every corner of the house. There is nothing quite like it: knowing every breath you take is bound to be sweet.

Tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic arts are sure to find employ, and to be well paid for their work, there being no restraints preventing strangers from exercising any art they understand, nor any permission necessary. If they are poor, they begin first as servants or journeymen; and if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become masters, establish themselves in business, marry, raise families, and become respectable citizens.

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

What is given by nature is not necessarily good, what is achieved by artifice is not necessarily worthless.

The sentence is the great invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.

I think the best shaped box ever on earth is a coffin which can be handmade to escort the forever numb-hands.