Quotes About Craft

Writing is a virus once caught never to be cured.

Of a bad playwright: "Saying nothing is the mother tongue of his art.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

Not prayer nor Bible verse, nor scholarship nor wit, nor grant under seal nor statute law can alter the fact of villain blood. Not all his craft and guile can make him a Howard, or a Cheney, or a Fitzwilliam, a Stanley or even a Seymour: not even in an emergency.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Farewell, Father," she said. He fell back upon his chair, choking. She laughed, not with mirth or even mockery, but something that was closer to a sob. "You crafted me so sharp, I cut even myself.

The most beautiful thing about a tree is what you do with it after you cut it down.

A good perfumer was part alchemist, part artist, and part wizard.

All writers are vampires.

The actor is there to translate what's on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That's my philosophy.

I just like to keep challenging myself, keep it varied. It's a craft, and I'm constantly trying to learn and get better at it.

If you don't have that indefinable unique personality, you must learn as much as possible about acting in a variety of roles. That's why, at the outset of my career, I decided to learn every facet of my profession.

I don't make films, and because I don't make films, I'm not an expert in the craft of bringing a film into the world, how you put its various pieces together. But where I feel like I'm an expert is my own feelings in response to a film.

Being an actor: that's a pretty big net. That's a big playing field. The Screen Actors' Guild is filled with many, many, many, many people and vastly different careers.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.

Ventriloquism today is in a slump.

It's really not the genre for me, or the venue, it's the writing.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

To be fair, when I started doing 'Verdict' I literally had no idea what I was doing. I wanted to do some theatre, as I wanted to do something different. I wanted to learn and get an understanding of the craft.

The only thing I have tried to do is be a part of different films and bring out a different side of me as an actor every time I play a character. I would like to be known as a versatile actor.

For me, as an actor, it is brilliant that I can do both song-dance films and also something like 'NH10.' It is versatility which every actor aspires.

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.

writing is performance.