Quotes About Craft

There's so much hocus-pocus about acting styles; there's too much mysticism attached to it. But it's a craft like any other - it's something you have to work hard at.

If I'm in a town for very long, usually I'll work out in the comedy club just to keep my chops or work out the beats on new stuff.

I don't want to spoil the magic, but it's a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It's the nearest we'll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more - you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

I have played Dracula a thousand times on stage and I find I have become thoroughly settled in the technique of the stage and not of the screen.

Process does matter; you need a process. What it is is up to no one but you. But if you can't sit down, write once upon a time, and go through however many hundred thousand words to get to happily ever after, you're never going to get anywhere.

As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.

Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril.

I just freestyle. I don't actually write the words on paper. It's just whatever comes into my mind. I'll record three or four lines at a time, get a good take, and do three or four more. It may be whatever comes into my mind. But I care about my craft a lot more than a lot of other people.

As I progressed in the firm, I learnt the craft, and as I learnt my craft, my partners and the firm threw up different opportunities.

I went to drama school for four years at Carnegie Mellon, conservatory training before television comedy. I was doing Shakespeare and Chekov plays. It's about delivering on the promise of a $100,000 education and taking the shackles off and trying the hand at my craft. I'm thrilled with what I've seen so far.

Actors who are super successful are the ones who thrive on the image by creating their forte.

By becoming an MBE, I hope it helps raise the profile of our sector and what a thriving industry it is. I also hope it inspires others entrepreneurs in craft to believe, innovate and put our industry firmly on the map.

I think there are some people who have talent flying out of their fingers and other actors who hone their craft. I am an actor who found their way. I bettered myself throughout my career, and I am proud of that fact.

We had to depend on other institutions to do research on our behalf. We had to use the information that already existed to craft the best practices to distribute throughout the country. And we had to do all of that in ten months.

I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

It's so fun to do theater, because as opposed to television, you just keep doing it again and again and again - every night. Sometimes it lands beautifully, and sometimes it lands just beside of it. It's like throwing a horseshoe. It's great fun.

If you're throwing someone off a roof, you're throwing them off the roof. It's there. You don't have to do anything extra with that. The audience is obviously going to react to that because it's such a heightened thing to do. But in the other moments, you really look for ways to craft those, because they're more important, honestly.

I always say to every actor, and to people that want to get into this industry, to just try to be on set as much as you can, try to go to acting class, and try to work on your craft because there's nothing that can prepare you, like just when you get thrown onto a set and you've got to work.

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

Writing is what I do. It's what makes me tick.

As an actor, you're tied to the writing. You live and die by what's written for you. And you can elevate that to a certain extent, but really, that's your blueprint.