Quotes About Craft

If you can avoid the grammatical bog of trying to wow English professors with your sentences, then you're well on your way to getting the reader to turn one page and then the next.

Ly" adverbs slow down the sentence and often foil the writer's intent.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

Talent is required, but much of writing is a matter of craft, which develops with time, attention, patience and practice, like playing an instrument or learning to dance.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

It's weird, not to sound too actor but I think that any time you do a performance, you kind of take a little piece of that character, cause it's a part of you you're using.

You can really get into it - especially in the movies, where you really have the time to get into your character and play her well.

I demanded two weeks of rehearsal because to me as an actor, that's the most important time.

I think being on a film set for such a long time made me a technical actor without realizing it.

For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.

I did stand-up for a long time and I did classical theater. As much time as you could spend on a stage will always inform you and your job, as you evolve.

I just try to remember my lines most of the time.

Theater is a really exciting place to return to all the time because it's incredible training for an actor.

I think when you're an actor and you're drawing on your emotions all the time, you need to be quite steady.

There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.

I think I'm someone who can prattle on a long time about something, which serves me well as a novelist, but it's the enemy when I'm writing short stories.

The guy who sits at the keyboard and types is so much smarter than I am. I think I got into writing so that I could spend as much time with that guy as possible.

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.

Acting is in everything but the words.

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

Thus the total armada amounted to 5,333 ships and craft of all types