Quotes About Craftsmanship

There's a lot of intelligence in the hands.When you pick up a shovel, the hands know what to do. The same thing's true of sitting at the piano.

And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.

By the work one knows the workmen.

Il dressa en face de mes yeux une de ces musiques à bouche qu'on achète dans les foires : du fer et du bois.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Either it's a good plot or it isn't. And if it's not a good plot, the best writing isn't going to help. And if it is, the worst writing isn't going to hurt it.

Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.

The most skilled hand is never anything but the servant of the mind.

Kissel worked in Idleness the way other artists worked in clay or marble.

You speak to me, in your own fashion, of a strange psychology which is able to reconcile the wonders of a master craftsmanship with aberrations due to unfathomable stupidity.

I start a picture and I finish it.

I believe in writing somewhat quickly, getting the story down; it can be bad, it can be a mess, but the key thing is to get it down.

Soetsu Yanagi, in the "Unknown Craftsman", writes, "Man is most free when his tools are proportionate to his needs." For example, for optimal productivity, a carpenter needs woodworking tools and an environment conducive to his work, not a steam shovel or army tank.

A beverage of leisure is a serious business," Shane Bowermaster was known to declare. "There can be no product of pleasure without the inverse on the end of the producer.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.

beret sleeves.

Painting working!

Worse, their relationship with their work is often emotionally violent. You want to make something? You are told to open up a vein and bleed. Time to edit your work? You are instructed to kill your darlings.

If you made something and it didn't work out, let it go. Remember that you're nothing but a beginner—even if you've been working on your craft for fifty years. We are all just beginners here, and we shall all die beginners. So let it go. Forget

Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it.

There is a quiet glory [in] merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations.

One year, Alma bought Prudence- who liked to draw flowers (beautifully, though not 'accurately')- a lovely book on botanical illustration called Every Lady Her Own Drawing Master: A New Treatise on Flower Painting. That same year, Prudence made for Alma an exquisite satin pincushion, rendered in Alma's favorite color, aubergine.