Crafts Quotes

I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it. ~ Joan Larkin

Art is elimination of the unnecessary. ~ Waldo Salt

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

When you are an actor, you bring a tool in your craft but you are not that person. ~ Pam Grier

Those to whom man teaches little, nature like a wise and prudent mother teaches much. ~ Hannah Crafts

What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?
I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.
The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs - I was a man before I was a king. ~ Robert E. Howard

In what we think of as bad dialogue, the characters talk directly to each other. ~ Diane Johnson

I'm giving up acting ... I'm 66 and there are a number of celebrations I've got to get down on paper, and acting doesn't allow me to do that. It was a hell of a drug, performance. It's a great thrill, especially for a storyteller. But it can go. Directing can go. Writing can't go. And in terms of what lies ahead, I want to have a burning focus - almost like smoke coming up from the paper as I write. ~ Athol Fugard

A craft can only have meaning when it serves a spiritual way. ~ Titus Burckhardt

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. ~ William Faulkner

I do not make films which are prescriptive, and I do not make films that are conclusive. You do not walk out of my films with a clear feeling about what is right and wrong. They're ambivalent. You walk away with work to do. My films are a sort of investigation. They ask questions ... Sometimes I hear that some [Hollywood] studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it. ~ Mike Leigh

Kristen is really focused and really quiet, as an actress. She just does her thing, but she's cool. I like her. I know a lot of people have mixed comments about her, but I think she's a rad person. She's just focused on what she's doing, as an actress, and she wants to pick the right roles, and she's committed to her craft. She's really cool. We got along. There weren't any tensions or anything. ~ Tinsel Korey

Rob [Tapert], myself and Bruce Campbell sat in hundreds of drive-insnot hundreds, but tens of drive-ins, watching these movies and learning how they were made, and we started to make our own in Super 8. And that's really how we got into horror films. After a while we learned to really like them, and the craft that went into them. ~ Sam Raimi

Half the rhymes you write, you're saying that you're better than the other MC. That's how we keep the craft sharp. ~ Ice-T

The play is really a kind of nightmare. It ought to flow rapidly and effortlessly from one moment to another. In London, we had difficulty with the set, which required too much effort to move around. Having gotten the benefit of seeing it done once, I wanted to work on the script, to make it sharper and more pointed. ~ Arthur Miller

Creativity runs across many categories in life, from the arts-and-crafts project a mum or dad does with their kids, to the bestselling author's manuscript, to the designs of the hairdresser, to the creations of the computer programming genius. ~ Tabatha Coffey

Writing original songs is much, much harder (I think) because you only have yourself to conjure up EVERY single moment a listener is going to hear. It's a craft that goes directly from your brain to their ears. You can never be sure that what you're writing is gonna be good enough to keep a listener engaged and truly experience something. It's a shot in the dark. ~ Alex Goot

I am interested in the idea of 'taste.' And by 'taste,' I mean opinion, inspiration and the craft of creating a personality through fabric and design. ~ Olivier Theyskens

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. ~ Virginia Woolf

Even illegal weapons have lost their panache. Zip guns and shanks were at least homemade. Where is the craft in a grade-schooler firing a magnum? What is the world coming to? It's not even bad to be a communist anymore! ~ John Waters

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing. ~ Alice Munro

I love working with my hands. The computer has taken over my life in a way that makes me really uncomfortable. I'm trying to find a happy medium that gives me freedom but also still goes back to the idea of craft. ~ Matana Roberts

I think a craft becomes an art form when the space of possible solutions becomes so huge that engineering can't carry you through. ~ Bill Budge

Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing. ~ Robert McKee

To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft. ~ John Szarkowski

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. ~ Simone Veil

THE CREATIVITY IS JUST SOMETHING THAT, I DON'T KNOW, YOU WORK VERY HARD AT, BUT PART OF YOU SAYS THAT YOU WERE BORN WITH IT. IT'S A CRAFT LIKE EVERY OTHER, YOU HAVE TO KEEP SHARP AND YOU HAVE TO BE AWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS. ~ Jon Bon Jovi

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better. ~ Jane Rule

Being a former theater student, of course, there is a part of me that is fascinated with stage crafts and what you can do with illusions and working within the confines of the studio. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

Practice ur craft and make it the best it can possibly be-Justin Timberlake ~ Justin Timberlake

You will stumble on secrets. Hidden all over the restaurant: Mexican oregano, looking cauterized, as heady as pot. Large tins of Chef's private anchovies from Catalonia hidden behind the bulk olive oil. Quarts of grassy sencha and tiny bullets of stone-ground matcha. Ziplock bags of masa. In certain lockers, bottles of sriracha. Bottles of well whiskey in the dry goods. Bars of chocolate slipped between books in the manager's office.

And people too, with their secret crafts, their secret fluency in other languages. The sharing of secrets is a ceremony, marking kinship. You have no secrets yet, so you don't know what you don't know. But you can intuit it while holding yourself on the skin of the water, treading above deep pockets, faint voices underneath you. ~ Stephanie Danler

Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing. ~ Robert Bringhurst

All along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby. ~ David Hockney

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. ~ Joseph Conrad

Photography begins not in the camera but in the
mind and the eye. The real work is one of noticing and appreciating, seeing things clearly and differently, and
sharing that vision with others. I have developed my
vision and my photographic craft in order to bring
the beauty of nature to light in a fresh way that
can inspire and nourish people. ~ Bill Atkinson

You can just reload, propel it and fly again. This is extremely important for revolutionizing access to space because as long as we continue to throw away rockets and space crafts, we will never truly have access to space. ~ Elon Musk

As much as I think John Coltrane belongs on the list, I think without Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, both of whom defined improvising on the tenor sax, there would not have been the evolution of the craft by John Coltrane. ~ Herbie Mann

I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn't right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear. ~ K.M. Soehnlein

The work element comes into it as well - how much you train and how much work you put into your craft, in the same way a carpenter would perhaps work under a great teacher, etc. ~ Paul Rankin

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~ James A. Michener

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic. ~ Edward Zwick

Life stand still here. ~ Virginia Woolf

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic. ~ Anne Sexton

We of the craft are all crazy. ~ Lord Byron

The hardest thing to get is true emotion. I always believe you need to earn that with the audience. You can't just tell them, 'Ok, be sad now.' ~ John Lasseter

From a craft standpoint, telling a story in the first-person present tense over the course of 500 pages is a daunting challenge. ~ Joseph Boyden

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it. ~ Mark Twain

Whenever you think you're writing what other people want to hear from you, and that it'll be commercial, you're doomed to disaster. Writing has to be as truthful and specific as we can make it. The minute we think that we're reaching more people and pleasing them, we get general. And audiences sense that and turn away, shun us. ~ Terrence McNally

Collaboration is a nice change of pace from the often solitary nature of the writer's craft. ~ Edward M. Lerner

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul. ~ Wassily Kandinsky

And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others. ~ Wole Soyinka

Bands today have to learn their craft by putting the hard work in that we did when we were young performers. ~ Elton John

I always want to be growing in my craft. Any artist should - whether you paint, whether you do music or film - always grow and study. ~ LeCrae

For millions, Roger Ebert will be remembered as a writer and television personality who brought a sense of passion and excellence to his craft. For me, he is a man who fused joy and courage as few others ever have. My life was enriched by having such a friend; it is poorer for losing such a friend. ~ Jeff Greenfield

You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so. ~ Hans Hofmann

Acting is something I love. It's a great craft that I have a lot of respect for. But I don't think it's any greater challenge than teaching 8-year-olds or any other career. In my life, I try not to make it more important than it is and I just hope that rubs off on the people around me. ~ Hugh Jackman

Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary. ~ J.M. Coetzee

What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I'm more interested in, there's the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious. ~ Alan Ayckbourn

In the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Writers learn their craft, above all, from the work of other writers. From reading. ~ Marie Arana

Surround yourself with people you can always learn something from. Always work with people that are better at their craft than you are. ~ Tony Vincent

Growth is an unavoidable part of life. Whether we mean for it to happen or not, our bodies continually nourish and regenerate themselves, our minds continually learn and expand, and our lives continually evolve. We have the power to craft our growth the way a landscaper crafts a majestic garden, or we can leave it to chance, allowing it to unfold wild as the weeds that spread across a vacant lot. ~ Scott Edmund Miller

Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in metaphorical space. ~ John L'Heureux

I haven't had a single moment of terror since they told me [I was dying]. My only regret is to die four pages too soon. If I can finish, then I'm quite happy to go. ~ Dennis Potter

As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible. ~ Peter Thiel

The biggest challenge for any craft person or artist is to accept the constraints of their medium and make something beautiful despite them. That's kind of fun, actually. ~ Ayelet Waldman

Diplomacy, of course, is a subtle and nuanced craft, so much so that it's said that when the most wily diplomat of the nineteenth-century passed away, other diplomats asked, on reports of his death, What do you suppose the old fox meant by that? ~ Ronald Reagan

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization. ~ John Banville

Sail the main course in a simple sturdy craft. Keep her well stocked with short stories and long laughs. Go fast enough to get there but slow enough to see. Moderation seems to be the key. ~ Jimmy Buffett

Just give me a good role that allows me to hone my craft, and I am a pretty happy camper. ~ Jimmy Smits

I've been strongly influenced, in technique as well as subject matter, by some of the early 20th-century book illustrators - Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac in particular, Burne-Jones and other Pre-Raphaelites, and the Arts-&-Crafts movement they engendered. I'm continually inspired by Rembrandt, Breughel (I've wondered whether his brilliant "Tower of Babel" had inspired Tolkien's description of Minas Tyrith), Hieronymous Bosch, Albrecht Durer, and Turner; it's not necessarily that they influence my work in any particular direction, more that their example raises my spirits, re-affirms my belief in the power of images to move and delight us, and shows me how much further I have to go, how much is possible. Having visited Venice and Florence for the first time, I am besotted with the Italian Renaissance artists - Botticelli, Bellini, da Vinci and others. Their work is calm, controlled, and yet each face and landscape contains such passion. In Botticelli's paintings, every pebble and every leaf is rendered with a religious devotion; there is reverence inherent in paying such close attention to every stone, turning painting itself into a form of worship, an act of prayer. ~ Alan Lee (artist)

Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public ... The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise. ~ Arthur Miller

Any work of art must first of all tell a story. ~ Robert Frost

I took many notes, more than usual before I sat down and wrote Act One, Scene One. I had perhaps eighty pages of notes ... I was so prepared that the script seemed inevitable. It was almost all there. I could almost collate it from my notes. The story line, the rather tenuous plot we have, seemed to work out itself. It was a very helpful way to write, and it wasn't so scary. I wasn't starting with a completely blank page. ~ Charles Busch

Monarch of earth, I shall confess my secret craft: I've always fought to purify wild flame to light, and kindle whatever light I found to burst in flame. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Harriet Levin [is] a shining poet in her generation ... The dynamics of her language and her vigorous voice distinguish all her poems. Levin's fearless willingness to tackle any subject combines with her subtle intelligence to produce a rare reading experience, the moving, psychologically sophisticated and intriguing work of a poet with both guts and craft ~ Molly Peacock

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments. ~ Joyce Cary

Be a sponge. Spend as much time as possible with people who truly know their craft and be a great listener. That is how you learn. ~ Jerry Colangelo

I want to be a great actor someday, and I've decided there's no use philosophizing; the only way is to work at my craft. ~ Al Pacino

Great writers zealously learn the craft of their profession so they can release the power and the depth of their imagination and experience. ~ Leonard Bishop

Art without heart is craft. ~ Eric Gibbons

Arts crafts and sciences uplift the world of being and are conducive to its exaltation. Knowledge is as wings to man's life and a ladder for his ascent. Its acquisition is incumbent upon everyone. ~ Bahaullah

I humbly thank the gods benign, For all the blessings that are mine ... The morning drips her dew for me, Noon spreads an opal canopy. Home-bound, the drifting cloud-crafts rest Where sunset ambers all the west; Soft o'er the poppy-fields of sleep, The drowsy winds of dreamland creep. What idle things are wealth and fame Beside the treasures one could name! ~ Robert Loveman

The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go - not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey. ~ Franz Kafka

A producer is someone who actually calls the shots. An executive producer is just a guy that eats more food at craft service. ~ Ryan Reynolds

I like to make things, but I looked at old craft books on weaving or mosaics or whatever, I'm like, 'I don't really know anything about that stuff.' ~ Amy Sedaris

A lot of people just love music, especially a lot of aspiring artists. They just want to jump in and start making music. They don't really take time to grow and appreciate the craft. ~ LeCrae

Translation is a disturbing craft because there is precious little certainty about what we are doing, which makes it so difficult in this age of fervent belief and ideology, this age or greed and screed. ~ Gregory Rabassa

The big secret is the ability to stay in the room. ~ Ron Carlson

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure. ~ Peter Carey

My hobbies are painting, crafts, and I like golfing. ~ Nancy Kerrigan

There are two kinds of actors
one sits in a dressing room waiting for his call and the other gets out into the business and polishes his craft by absorbing everything. I don't know enough, I'll never learn everything I need to learn. When a guy thinks he's already learned it, he can only go backwards. ~ Clint Eastwood

I've never written a fiction before about real people ... I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN]. ~ Michael Frayn

When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair. ~ Robert Stone

I introduced myself to Scorsese and I said, "If you need someone to do craft services, I'm there." ~ William H. Macy

The life so short, the crafts so long to learn. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

There is a trend in the whole [U.S.] culture toward making things shorter. People have been watching too much television, and they have a television mentality. I think people really are wary of sitting in a theatre too long. They're not used to it. ~ Rocco Landesman

It's important to focus on what we do best and master one craft at a time. ~ Russell Simmons

Gather knowledge ... Visit galleries, museums, art and craft fairs ... Read books and magazines. Take workshops. Use your senses. Experience stimulates your memory and imagination. ~ Nita Leland