Quotes About Craftsmanship

Some people are really drawn to technology and I liken them to artists.

The craft Emmys are kind of the kids table at Thanksgiving. You're not really invited to the big dance. It's still really, really exciting, and the statue still counts.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

Moonshiners put more time, energy, thought, and love into their cars than any racer ever will. Lose on the track, and you go home. Lose with a load of whiskey, and you go to jail.

Just because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that she becomes that - a piece of something.

The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time.

The only sensible person is my tailor. He measures me anew each time he sees me.

I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.

We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.

Every time I get mad, I grab my hammer and make a bookshelf or something.

Be a sponge. Spend as much time as possible with people who truly know their craft and be a great listener. That is how you learn.

You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.

A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've thought that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I've felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people's minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves. And you know what? I still do.

Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

A finely carved Black Forest cuckoo clock hung just to the right of the hutch. Phil would love that, Reuben thought. Phil had once collected cuckoo clocks, and their constant chiming and tweeting and cooing had driven everybody at home a little nuts.

We had been made over into portraits of ourselves in marble by a master sculptor.

Did you ever think how conceited those Oriental rug weavers are, to believe they have to try and make a mistake so as not to compete with God? Like they would have done it perfectly otherwise, if they hadn't forced themselves to mess it up?

He drew the brush along the wood with dreamy strokes. Wasn't it interesting how the grain of the wood told a story, almost—how you could follow the threads and be surprised at how far they traveled, or where they unexpectedly broke off.

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said It is the trade entering his body.

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

But books don't happen by accident.