Quotes About Craftsmanship

Can you be sure?" "I haven't spent the last fifteen hundred years learning how to knit my own socks, boy!" The crone looked like she might box Heinrich's ears, if she could reach them.

em todos os tipos de obra criadora o trabalhador e seu objeto tornam-se um, o homem se une ao mundo no processo da criação. Isto, porém, só permanece verdadeiro para o trabalho produtivo, para a obra que eu planejo, produzo e em que vejo o resultado de meu trabalho.

become works of art so detailed, so precisely articulated

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.

You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.

I don't have to be proud of it. I only have to do it well. – Thomas Hudson

There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!

How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.

Easy reading is hard writing

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn...

I have tried to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

He talked of his work as something altogether apart from himself. There was nothing conceited or braggartly about him.

If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master

I have tried simply to write the best I can; sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration