Quotes About Craft

Frances Conroy - brilliant, brilliant actress.

With most British actors, it's amazing. I think they start with the character on the outside and work in.

I love to make a living from blowing bubbles.

If I wasn't doing music, I might have been a builder.

Acting isn't like being an athlete. There's no real quantifiable measure. It's just a bunch of people feeling things.

One man cannot practice many arts with success.

There are movies whose feel-good sentiments and slick craft annoy me so deeply that I know they will become box-office successes or top prizewinners. I call this internal mechanism my Built-In Hit Detector.

In general, I think comedy is more difficult to write, to direct, and to act successfully.

I live for comedy. I've been doing it for such a long time. Comedy is hard in itself.

Generally, screenplays suck.

The funny thing about acting is, there's no 'right' way to make it. Some people need to work their butts off, and some don't. They're just naturals. I wasn't a natural. I sucked.

I learned to write crime novels by reading people I hoped to emulate: people like James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Joseph Wambaugh, and Sue Grafton.

The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.

Records have never really been my strong suit. I've always been a much better live act. I didn't understand the language of the studio. You sing differently in a studio. The language, the craft - it's just a whole different deal. I avoided the problem on my first record by doing a live album.

My job isn't about pursuing fame and then becoming an actor. It's about becoming an actor, and if fame follows suit, that's fine.

I've been doing some acting, writing classes, and taking a holistic approach so I can actually be good at this craft. But ideally I'd eventually want to get my own show and make my 'Atlanta' or my 'Master of None' - whatever that would look like - in whatever media landscape that would best suit it.

It's hard for me to find a script that's perfectly suited to me, so even if it's a good script, I'll still have to work on it with someone and shape it, making it the film that I want to make. So in that respect, I prefer to do the stuff that I've generated anyway.

I'm doing a little bit of acting, but I can't really say it's going to be a career or even that I'm really suited to it. It's a whole other craft you have to study and be passionate about.

Some people ask me what instruments I play, but usually I'll just say I'm more of a producer or a composer or songwriter - those are my strongest suits: arranging and composing.

Writing and creating, those things come to me on their own. I feel like... you sort of summon them and it's like allowing the universe to enter your heart in an entirely different way to what it normally does. It's like inviting that energy of the universe to enter into your craft in a way where it has a meaning.

Nothing is off-limits. There's just some things I cannot crack. Politics I can't do. When I start to talk about it, I just get really angry and super sincere. I have never found a way to craft all of that absurdity into funny.

People assume that a lot of pop artists don't write their songs. That, for me, is super frustrating because I think it detracts from some of the art and some of the craft of what we do. I'm at the helm of it, and I think that is what people don't see.

I know it might seem a little superficial, but every actor has their thing. Some people focus on the walk, but for me, it's all about the nails and the voice. Those are the two most important things.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.