Quotes About Craftsmanship

In every other aspect of their life, we have entertainment that is crafted almost to an individual. So they expect that from stand-up as well.

Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

This then is the scribe's direct purpose: the making of useful things legibly beautiful.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

Become a motivator of writing, not the butcher of it; similarly, become an editor, not the copy editor.

Molten gold thrown on ground solidifies into an ungainly mass, but put in moulds becomes attractive jewelry. Similarly, unarticulated thoughts reduced to writing will be nothing, but meaningless jumble; whereas, proper reasoned and structured thoughts expressed in writing become meaningful, and if well written, can become masterpieces of literature

A tea bowl that has no imperfections is said to be lacking in beauty

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.

How many things pass through time randomly detached from the bodies and voices of persons. My mother knew the art of making clothes last forever.

el momento en que la escritura parece cuidarse únicamente de sacar adelante la historia. Es ahí donde radica por completo la alegría de escribir.

Lo descubrí hace mucho al observar en el piso una tabla de madera, colocarle una hoja encima y tallar hasta que el grano de madera se convierta en la superficie del mar. Vi los nudos y quise conservar lo que me decía la madera, su paisaje, su poesía entrañable, su sexo.

Broke the tassels from the birch-trees, Steeped the foliage in honey, Made a lye from milk and ashes, Made of these a strong decoction, Mixed it with the fat and marrow Of the reindeer of the mountains, Made a soap of magic virtue,

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 from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

Chinese were not simply great craftsmen and ingenious designers, they were also a deeply moral people. Ethics was their true strength, and theirs was an ethics that crucially eschewed metaphysical or theological speculation and adhered to education and conversation.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

words, literature, are not in the consciousness of the person who writes but in his fingers and the paper and the typewriter, just like the statues of Michelangelo were in the block of marble where they were revealed.

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they fill the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.—Barbara Bloom

A good style must have an air of novelty, at the same time concealing its art.

To become an able man in any profession, there are three things necessary -- nature, study, and practice.

In proportion as labor is divided, arts are perfected.