186 Craft Quotes

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.

To tell the truth, the chariot was an astonishing sight to behold, because I had polished the steel of my flying house so carefully that it reflected the sunlight on all sides. It was so bright and dazzling that I thought, myself, that I had been carried away in a chariot of fire.

The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.

It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.

A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

Remarks are not literature.

When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.

To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.

I'm in the business of helping stories get told, and I love this story. People don't say to me, When you were in Proof, were you afraid to play a mathematician? Or, Was it scary to play a Marine in Jarhead? Why is that?

Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.

Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

4) It is a sin to waste the reader's time.

What good I have comes from the pure air of your native Arezzo, and also because I sucked in chisels and hammers with my nurse's milk.

But we, O blockhead, with dogged spite and armored love shall force those deaf dark powers to grow ears and hear us! I know that God is earless, eyeless, and heartless too, a brainless Dragon Worm that crawls on earth and hopes in anguish and then in secret that we'll give him soul, for then he, too, may sprout ears, eyes, to match his growth, but God is clay in my ten fingers, and I mould him!

Goethe is an altogether practical Poet. He is in his works what the English are in their wares: highly simple, neat, convenient and durable. He has done in German Literature what Wedgwood did in English Manufacture. He has, like the English, a natural turn for Economy, and a noble Taste acquired by Understanding. Both these are very compatible, and have a near affinity in the chemical sense.

The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn't have much to do with art - the expressive use of techniques - it probably doesn't have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it.

Without question, Steve is the best Broadway lyricist, past or present.

This baby (the Remington SL3 typewriter) speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

About Jack Kerouac: 'That's not writing; That's typing.'

He was truly after an art in which the creator could be as intelligent as he liked, but in which intelligence must be transmuted entirely into form, so that no lumps of thinking are left showing.

Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the 'Georgics,' where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.'

'O frate,' disse, 'chesti qu'io ti cerno col ditto,' e addito un spirto innanzi, 'fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno. Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi soverchio tutti; e lascia dir li stolti che quel di Lemosi credon ch'avanzi.

Fra tutti il primo Arnaldo Daniello Gran maestro d'amor; ch'a la sua terra Ancor fa onor col suo dir strano e bello.

...all the songs are solid compositions and are performed with sincerity, grace, and an abundance of technique.

'As a vocalist, Elvis Presley possessed the rare ability to give the melodramatic a genuine authenticity; it's easy to take Elvis Presley for granted and yes, we all know that Elvis had a huge role in defining rock in the beginning, but few of us really know what that means; but then there's that voice, which Elvis uses to cut through to the most complex meaning of the song - the meaning that the song's writers might not even know exists - and lay it bare. On 'From Elvis In Memphis', he takes the longing sentiment in 'Any Day Now' (1969), his voice lending it a certain buoyancy that most artists would never even think belongs, and in doing so he embeds a deceptively simple pop song with depth and mystery, all through inflection; a craftsman at heart, his experimentation didn't manifest itself in innovation, but in refinement of his already incomparable technique; as a result, 'From Elvis In Memphis' documents what happens when an artist who instinctively personalizes the songs he sings decides to get even more personal; the outcome is raw, stripped of all pretense, and dedicated to the idea of the song, his voice bringing with it a grave amount of weight; if you want an indication of why Elvis deserves a place in current pop culture, pick up 'From Elvis In Memphis'; the music speaks for itself; authenticity never goes out of style.

A pair of scissors is a ... wonderful instrument ... an occupation I can lose myself in ... my pleasure in cutting things out grows ever greater. Why didn't I think of it before.

What I do when I write is that i'll do a raggedy, rough version just to hear the chorus, just to see how much I like the chorus. If it works for me that way when it's raggedy, then I'll know it will just work... Listen to that, that's at home. Janet, Randy, Me... Janet and I are going 'Whoo, Whoo... Whoo, Whoo...' I do that same process with every song. It's the melody, it's the melody that's most important, If the melody can sell me, then I'll go to the next step The idea is to transcribe from what's in your mentality onto tape If you take a song like 'Billie Jean,' Where the bass line is the prominent, dominant piece, the protagonist of the song, the main driving riff that you here, getting the character of the riff to be just the way you want it to be, that takes a lot of time. Listen, you're hearing four basses on there, doing four different personalities, and that's what gives it character, but it takes a lot of work. ~Michael Jackson listening to an early writing version of Billie Jean on his iPhone, Ebony Magazine December 2007.

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

You can either look at your career as the things you're going to leave behind, and they have to be executed flawlessly and you have to know exactly what it is that you're doing. Or you can be realistic about the fact that you're going to learn as you practice what you do.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.

'Composers combine notes, that's all.'

'Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.'

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

I don't really start until I get my proofs back from the printers. Then I can begin my serious writing.

I began acting, and I thought, Well, this is an interesting road; maybe I should keep traveling on it. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, so I started to read everything about acting - Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, Michael Chekhov. I started soaking it up. (2004)

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

lf l am not mistaken, the words 'art' and 'artist' did not exist during the Renaissance and before: there were simply architects, sculptors, and painters, practicing a trade.

I am a graphic artist heart and soul, though I find the term 'artist' rather embarrassing.

I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well.

Originality is merely an illusion.

Mon metier et mon art, c'est vivre.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

I'm an absolute perfectionist. I'm never happy with a finished album. There's always something I don't like.

That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.

Thank you, if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

Writing, is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

I do what many dream of, all their lives, --Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive--you don't know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat-- Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, (I know his name, no matter)--so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them, In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.

When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, 'It's pretty, but is it Art?'

Ce n'est pas avec des idees qu'on fait des vers, c'est avec des mots.

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do-not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story...When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.

Kill your darlings.

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master

...the excellence of the mental entertainment consists less in the subject than in the author's skill in well dressing it up.

For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right from the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli.

I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this... that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes... pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts... all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees 'steel' as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.

If we cannot write with the beauty of Mozart, let us at least try to write with his purity. ~ Johannes Brahms

Mozart touched no problem without solving it to perfection. ~ Donald Francis Tovey