Quotes About Craftsmanship

My drawings at first were made altogether in watercolors, but they wanted softness and a great deal of finish.

I especially love all the instruments of art: inks, pens, paintbrushes, watercolors and oils, fine papers and canvases, and although I love to mess around with these tools and objects, I have minimal artistic skills.

Good musicals, a strange world, seem so easy. People say, 'Ohhh, it's magic.' Nothing's magic. A thing doesn't jell. Adapt. Change the rhythm. Shorten the scene. Rewrite the character. Maneuver the waters. Seeming easy is why so many shows aren't good.

Robert De Niro's sort of like a surfer: he doesn't really force anything. So if he catches the wave, or something spills out - to watch a guy be a force at what he does. He has a good worth ethic.

It's great to wave the flag - I always say we're proud to be made in America - but I think our distinction is we make it well in America.

I've always said that Guy Clark is a regional songwriter without being regional. He's global. His craft is like, well, Larry McMurtry would be an example. I kind of see Guy Clark and Larry McMurtry in the same wave.

Our goals must be to find new, environmentally-friendly ways by which to continue the art of creation, to utilize our valuable human skills, and to make things that will bring joy.

My movies are unadorned, they're not particularly fancy, I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting.

Get your butt in a chair and write. If it comes out weak or bad or clunky or ordinary, then accept that this happens to everyone. Everyone. Get it down, get it done, and fix it in the rewrite. Just like everyone from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling to Chuck Palahniuk does.

Honestly, I envy painters, who can have a masterpiece in one morning. Or musicians, who can write something in 30 minutes and arrange it in an hour, sometimes. 'Cause with this, with writing, you can occasionally feel like a caveman, like you've been working with pitch and tar on this brush.

I went to Naples to work with one of the best pizza-makers in the world, and guess how long he bakes his pizzas for? He bakes them for 45 seconds. In and out. And they're incredible. Any more than that, and it's no longer considered a pizza. I've been spouting off to people for years - six minutes in an oven.

I don't care if you're doing haute cuisine or burgers and pizza, just do it right.

What I loved about the 1950s is that there is an aesthetic to even the average film. The way the camera is placed, the way characters move, the way you dressed the sets, the respect for craft and actors, I do miss that in today's films.

I've watched my mom take a plain piece of paper and create something beautiful out of it, and I think that kind of manifested for me in taking a character from the page and bringing that to life.

Seven days a week, I'm always drawing, doodling, or painting, whether I'm in the studio or on a plane.

There was a time when I restored antique planes to support my art habit.

Well, you know, the original banjos were all handmade instruments. Gourd - it would be made with gourds and whatever, you know, materials would have been around. And, you know, first hundred years of its existence, the banjo's known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument, you know?

I love Anthropology for kitchenware - they make the best bowls, plates, cutlery etc.

Whatever it is, if you draw, you paint, you're a carpenter, you play football, the more you do it, you're a journalist, the more stories you write, the more people you interview and navigate your way through these different personalities to get your story, the better you're going to get at it. Acting's no different.

For us chess players the language of artist is something natural.

It's my goal to help actors achieve their best work, and I think I speak the same language as actors, so I understand how they do it, and I just love being able to create the playground in which they build their beautiful sandcastle.

The stainless-steel frets were a major breakthrough, because of the amount of playing and bending that I do. I have to get my guitars refretted every couple of months.

When I act, a part of me goes into the character I am playing.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.