Crafts Quotes - Page 8

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.

Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

As I get into it more, I want to grow as an artist, as an entertainer, and basically perfect my craft.

Every experience that you experience yourself you use, because that's our craft.

Praise from an enemy smells of craft.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

If you're lucky as you get older, you respect the craft and it becomes a skill.

The only thing you have then to believe in is your craft.

I'll need my whole lifetime to polish my craft.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

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

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

Once the anchor of reason has been cut, ones craft may go anywhere. One may become a St Francis or equally a Hitler.

My father was a very disciplined singer who worked hard at his craft, and I was around that growing up.

Here in America we're doing the most wonderful crafts

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

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.

Songwriting is as much a craft as a talent.

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

On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.