Quotes About Craft

There is no division, in practice, between work and life. [An intellectual craft] is a practice that involves the whole person, continually drawing on past experience as it is projected into the future.

Borrow liberally, combine uniquely, and create your own bespoke blueprint.

For podcasting: In the first 3 to 9 months, you should be honing your craft and putting out increasingly better work. "Good content is the best SEO," as Robert Scoble originally told me. You

It's like the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy, or anyone who delights in anything ephemeral. The charm in a bottle of wine, the craft, all the work that goes into it . . . actually delighting in the fact that it's perishable and goes away I find really helpful. I've gotten a lot of miles out of a beautiful bottle of wine, not just for the taste and the buzz, but the symbolism of delighting in something that goes away.

In pondering the request for "green time," Corso theorized that radar had caused loss of the craft's control systems, resulting in its subsequent crash.

As modern readers of masterpieces like The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Story of the Stone know, some degree of "unfinishedness" was to be expected, and perhaps desired, even in novels of undeniable craft and artistry by tremendously sophisticated authors. Vernacular novels were intentionally circulated not as finished products, but with room for readers, as well as editors and commentators, to contribute their own thoughts.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'

Writing is this odd act, right? To sit and type, or write by hand, or whatever people do. And it requires a real discipline because it is really a sheer act of will that you're creating something, and you're doing it by yourself.

I always go for the craft first because, to me, that's like an oil well - you either hit the oil or you don't.

It's not what you see on-screen that makes a performance. It's the things you should never know about - it's the secrets.

I think it's really, really good for me to be on stage once a year. It keeps your chops good. There's nothing else like it.

One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.

I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors.

I'm an interior designer, first and foremost. I can do one thing really well, and I'm going to stay in my little niche.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

I've heard New York actors say Chicago actors intimidate them because apparently we're the real nitty-gritty actors who're in a town where being onstage doesn't necessarily get you anything except your craft.

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

So, I lived at the Beijing Opera, I ate there, I learned a craft. And the money we made went into the company.

I've met Michael Keaton, John Favreau, Marisa Tomei - they're all really amazing people and really, really professional. I've learned so much from just watching them operate on set.

In order to make a film, you have to operate on many different levels, making all these different forms of expression converse, and so I just followed that intuition.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

A book is either nicely written or it's badly written. That's it.

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.