Quotes About Craftsmanship

When you work for long, you know things about your craft, but how differently you are going to project it so that it can still look new is what I am constantly trying.

I have expertise of performing, not promoting.

Every prop, every shot, every pearl that rolled across the floor was exactly how I wanted it to be.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

I really - I don't take my work that seriously, and I think that's what keeps me loose. If I try to write, if I catch myself trying to write, I'll fall right on my face. I'll see it. If I see in the prose that I'm - 'Boy, look at me writing,' I rewrite it. I rewrite it because I don't, because I think it's distracting.

If you wrote a crummy line or maybe didn't sing to the best of your ability, there's layers of 10 different instruments all working to convey something. In writing prose for the memoir, if it's not working, it's just not working. It's harder to figure out how to fix it.

I am a proud participant of the Spencer Tracy School of Acting: Know your lines, don't bump into the furniture.

Mighty is geometry joined with art resistless.

We are women, unable to perform noble deeds, but most skilful architects of every sort of harm.

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

I also have my crochet. It dates from when I began to think. Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole … A cloth, and I don't know if it's for a garment or for nothing. A soul, and I don't know if it's for feeling or living. What

Desenrolo-me como uma meada multicolor, ou faço comigo figuras de cordel, como as que se tecem nas mãos espetadas e se passam de umas crianças para as outras. Cuido só de que o polegar não falhe o laço que lhe compete. Depois viro a mão e a imagem fica diferente. E recomeço.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually—like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle.

Flaubert Gustave Flaubert

I like building and making things. I, perhaps, would like to try my hand at directing one day. Sometimes I fancy myself as an architect - but I think I might need to go back to school for that.

I have always been fascinated by Shaker design and the culture of the Shakers.

Buttons, for me, are very sculptural things, and they are so fascinating.

Beautiful engineering always held a fascination for me.