Quotes About Craft

My only goal is to stay focused on my craft and make sure my life is as sharp as it can be to attack any character that is given to me.

As the writer you are the puppet-master and can control everything. Believe me, that is a whole lot of fun because it ain't something that's going to be happening very often in real life!

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

Life is like cooking your masterpiece recipe. You have to get the right ingredients,have the right mixture and the right cooking time to reveal the PERFECT and DELICIOUS TASTE of your craft.

Details are the Life of Prose.

My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it

Acting is pretty much my whole life.

Art and science have their meeting point in method.

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.

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.

I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?

Well, that's just it, I thought: you didn't just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That's what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

Do you want to be an actor, or do you want to be a celebrity? I made that decision when I went to Juilliard. I wanted to be an actor. So, if I get the opportunity to be an actor and do some cool, fun and interesting projects, I'm going to do that.

Creating a piece of writing is really the easiest thing in the world—about as natural as creating excrement (and many writers will, indeed, describe their work as such).

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

There's no art where there's no fee.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Man is armed with craft and courage, which, untamed by justice, he will most wickedly pervert, and become at once the most impious and the fiercest of monsters.

Novices in the art attain to finish of diction and precision of portraiture before they can construct the plot.

Song-writing's just kinda like catching fish--you sit there and pull them out as they go by--though I think Bob Dylan's up stream from me somewhere.