Quotes About Craftsmanship

When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.

I continually blacken pages and scribble away, so I always have a number of songs that are half-finished.

In 'Dark Skye,' I rewrote every one of the Pandemonia scenes over and over before I was happy with them - hundreds of pages are now sitting in a folder called 'Cuttings,' never to be read. Ouch!

If I've written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It's like I need eight hours to do two hours' work.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.

I'm very painful to deal with when I create a shoe.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Car chases are as painstaking to make as they are fun to watch. They take a lot of time, and you have to keep the energy up.

A lot of people feel that there is less artistry involved in cartoon making unless they have painstaking control of each frame.

Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.

I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism.

If you want to learn how to paint, go to Caravaggio.

A script can just be a blueprint, and you've got to go in and build it and color it in and paint it.

I have a sewing machine that I adore, and I spend a lot of time sitting in front of it when I'm not working. And any excuse to paint or draw or do something artistic with my hands really gets me going. Definitely aspiring.

I'm interested in all kinds of art. I draw and paint and don't know how to play the banjo, but I do play the banjo.

I would love to learn how to paint motorcycles and stuff like that. I really, really am fascinated by that.

Designers are not artists. They may have the talent of one, but if they want to work in that way they should paint or sculpt.

It's like I'm basically an artist. I'm no different from a painter who sits there and loves what he does.

The idea of being a painter, I've always thought, is better than being an artist or a sculptor.

My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.