Quotes About Craft

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

Obviously you're looking out the window and you're seeing Earth and that's moving and then you're in a spacecraft now that can move on all axes while you're floating inside it and I think, for some people, maybe the combination of all three is a little bit of a sensory overload.

I have developed my eye as a cinematographer through the craft of operating. When I am not operating, I am often anxious, uncertain, restless, sometimes irritable. When I am in the position of working with Steadicam or remote cameras, I fly with a broken wing.

I was really learning my craft as a jazz singer and working with some great players and all, really growing and feeling my wings.

Theatre gives you wings as an actor.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

And I'm very surprised that all this stuff actually worked out to where I could have a career in film, gain the benefit of my education, and be thankful that I was able to break into my craft as an actor.

I enjoy comedic things. People don't understand it's the hardest thing to do. We have a ratio of 25-to-1 between good dramatic actors and people who are considered good comic actors.

I think the hardest thing to do in the world, show-business-wise, is write comedy.

To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

I realized probably when I was, like, 20 years old that the hardest thing to do is to write a pop song - not, like, a candy-pop, throwaway pop song.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

To entertain looks very flippant, but it is the hardest thing in the world.

The most important thing is to get better at your craft, and concussions and head impacts are a setback.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument - learning to do your craft - that's the most important thing! It's not about what goes on in a computer!

I just knew how to do the one thing I did, and whether I did it well or not depended on who the director was.

Having worked as both comedian and crime writer, the one thing I know is that both involve the delivery of a performance.

The only thing you have then to believe in is your craft.

The only thing I like about being an actress is acting.

Acting is the only thing I'm even vaguely good at and acting is something that I think I do know about.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.

The only thing that matters is the theater!

And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.