Selected craft quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

5. There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

6. You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

7. 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.

8. Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.

9. 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.

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

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

12. I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

13. 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.

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

15. 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.

16. I put the words down and push them a bit.

17. Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

18. The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

19. 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.

20. Remarks are not literature.

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

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

23. 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.

24. The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.

25. 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?

26. 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.

27. 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.

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

29. 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.

30. The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

31. Every writer I know has trouble writing.

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

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

34. 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.

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

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

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. Easy reading is damn hard writing.

41. I kill myself for my craft

42. I have recently re-read much of Chekhov and it's a humbling experience. I don't even claim Chekhov as an influence because he influenced all of us. Like Shakespeare his writing shed the most perfect light - there's no striving in it, no personality. Well, of course, wouldn't I love to do that!

43. There ain't a note that I play on stage that can't be traced back directly to my mother and father.

44. Poetry: 'The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.'

45. What a creative genius - what an inventor... A guy like that, you just sit back and say, okay, I'll never get there!

46. What Keaton did physically, is actually quite startling when you discover that he did all of his own stunts... The famous one is when the house falls. He had to stand on a mark. I'm told it was a nail - if he moved an inch to one side he would have been crushed to death.

47. Cavafy's attitude toward the poetic vocation is an aristocratic one. His poets do not think of themselves as persons of great public importance and entitled to universal homage, but, rather, as citizens of a small republic in which one is judged by one's peers and the standard of judgment is strict.

48. This is not work but a kind of workmanship. First out of paper, then from the body. To provoke thought into form, molded according to a measure. I think of a tailor who is his own fabric.

49. Well, a novel does acquire a certain kind of richness when you work on it for a long time that can't really be faked.

50. My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. 'Would you hit a woman with a child?- No, I'd hit her with a brick.' Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

51. After secretly observing the unstudied grace of her movements, the most celebrated picture-maker of the province burned the implements of his craft, and began life anew as a trainer of performing elephants.

52. Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together. Just words writing.

53. I can watch Astaire anytime. I don't think he ever made a wrong move. He was a perfectionist. He would work on a few bars for hours until it was just the way he wanted it. Gene was the same way. They both wanted perfection, even though they were completely different personalities.

54. I am especially proud that I have been recognized as a songwriter with the BMI award I received in 1989. You see, it is one thing to be able to sing and entertain, and another completely different one to be recognized as a songwriter. Songwriters are sometimes the 'unsung heroes' of music making and it takes a lot of insight and community awareness to be able to write songs that appeal to the masses.

55. That's not writing, it's typing.

56. If you can do a part and not have the acting show.

57. Prentice: This appalling situation is the result of my lax moral code. It's clean living and Teach Yourself Woodwork for me from now on!

58. The musical equivalent to those children's TV programmes where you make a model of the Battersea power station out of egg-boxes.

59. I really thought that the make-up artist for Cinderella Man should have won. I mean, it's so hard to make Russell Crowe look like he got in a fight.

60. 'Well, I had to do a nude scene [in the play Indiscretions], and you're on stage naked but you get over it, you do whatever you have to do. But the first night, my character is just getting out of the bath, and the rest of the crew had poured in freezing cold water.'

61. Although she had piano and violin lessons at school, Bush is essentially self-taught. I have always been fascinated by the difference of dynamics at work between popular artists and conventionally trained classical musicians, and had a similar experience with the Edge, of U2, when we worked together on the score of a film called Captive. In fact, gifted 'pop' musicians like Bush and U2 are far more demanding of themselves in the studio than classical musicians can afford to be, and will spend days working on a tiny fragment.

62. What I always wanted to be was a magician... My real upbringing when I was a teenager was doing magic shows, all over the state, with my father and brothers. Doing magic, you not only have to be able to do a trick, you have to have a little story line to go with it. And writing is essentially a trick.

63. Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art. (p. 208)

64. Her style looks absurdly simple- an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable. (p. 215)

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

66. 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.

67. 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!

68. 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.

69. 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.

70. 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.

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

72. 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.

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

74. 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.

75. 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.'

76. '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.

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

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

79. '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.

80. 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.

81. 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.

82. 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.

83. 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.

84. Poetry must be as well written as prose.

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

86. 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.

87. 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.

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

89. 'Composers combine notes, that's all.'

90. '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.'

91. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

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

93. 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)

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

95. 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.

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

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

98. Originality is merely an illusion.

99. Mon metier et mon art, c'est vivre.

100. 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.