Quotes About Craft

Truth is, every writer has to be a good editor, and you have to edit yourself. It's a skill every writer has to acquire.

Michael Chabon

Writing is about music...finding the music of a sentence....

Chapman's craft, his example, invites us to imagine a very different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that shrinks the distance between the two, so that we might again begin to see them for what they are and in spite of everything will always be, which is in this boat together.

It's hard to simulate the things that I do.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

I learned a lot about what I do with my craft, how I present my music. A lot of things about him were very much an influence on me and everybody else. Once you get in that fold and you're around it, you get to experience something that I don't think we'll ever see again. There will never be anybody like Frank Sinatra. Ever.

Acting is my profession; I enact all roles with sincerity.

I think it's all the same animal for me. There are actors who sing, and there are actors who direct, and I also improvise. That's one thing I do as part of my acting. I don't really separate the two.

I can sing, but I consider myself a bass player. I'm, you know, a musician first.

I'm a method actor as well as a method singer.

Actors and singers share common ground in that they both express something.

My aspirations were never anything other than I really, really admired certain singers over the years, and I just wanted to do the best I could. And that has been kind of like the way I've been fortunate enough to be able to have a career, have some success, and yet continue to learn my craft.

One piece of advice I often give young singers, including my son Vijay, is to not get sidetracked from their primary duty of learning music. This is the age of marketing and hard sell. Everybody wants instant results. But no amount of hard sell will prop you up if you don't hone your craft.

To me, singing and acting have always gone hand and hand.

I love theater, and I love that you have to be so intensely in the character and you have to hit that place every single night. It's just really good training. It was just a very good way of falling in love with my craft.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.

Game development combines all this disparate art stuff I'd been doing into one single thing that I could use to say very specific stuff.

So I'm truly an actor who sings, and not a singer who acts.

My mom was a hairdresser. My aunt was a hairdresser. My brother was a hairdresser. My sisters are hairdressers.

I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

I'm an actor first and foremost, who happens to do improv. I've also done sitcoms, I've done stage.

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms.