Quotes About Craft

Ballet is such a disciplined craft and it has given me a good grounding.

I have grown in my writing and I care about it now and I know how important it is to write stuff.

I've been on 'Hollyoaks' since I was 15, and I've grown up on the show. I'm so very fortunate to be given the opportunity to learn my craft in such a fantastic environment.

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care.

'Hester Street' was my most complete character study, but 'Annie Hall' and 'The Last Detail' were also great.

As writers, our craft makes us sit alone at a desk and hammer away at our novel. Doing that day in and day out makes it really easy to forget that there's a whole community of writers out there, and they love contributing to other writers' success!

Ah! Nay! Let it be. The Philosopher's Stone is what we seek, everyone. For, if we had it, we could then transmute lead into gold, and then would we be safe enough. But, unto God in Heaven, I do avow, in spite of all our craft, and all our efforts, and all our magic, the Stone will not come to us.

If you paint, write, do mosaics, knit - if it's solving that part of your brain saying, 'I need to do this,' you've won.

Writing is writing. It's an abiding, wonderful talent, craft, gift that stays with you your whole life. And you can go in different forms, and you can try them. Look at me: I'm writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it.

Comedy is wonderful when you really nail it and you hear people laughing, but it's not always that easy.

The key to acting - from what little I know about that wonderful craft - is listening, and interacting with the other person in order to achieve magic. One way to do that is almost to provoke.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

What people forget is that I'm an actress. That's the wonderful thing about what I do. I get to play different roles.

It's a wonderful thing to watch an actor just act.

I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

I love beautiful wood.

And we turned off and 30 miles south they're standing in the middle of our road blocking our way, stopped the car, got out, took us through the path in the woods, where the craft was on the ground.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.

Many writers learned their craft and work ethic at a newspaper. I benefited from that.

If they respect the craft and what we're doing and they bring something to the table and they work hard, I don't care what you do as your side job or as your day job.

I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do, but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination.

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

Fame isn't happiness, but success and being respected in your craft is worth fighting for. You've got to work hard to be noticed.