Quotes about Craftsmanship

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder.

A masterpiece is never created in a hurry.

People who seek to serve the community end up falsifying their work, she wrote, whether the work is writing a novel or baking bread, because they are not single- mindedly focused on the task at hand. But if you serve the work— if you perform each task to its utmost perfection— then you will experience the deep satisfaction of craftsmanship and you will end up serving the community more richly than you could have consciously planned.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement? Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day — for a bit, anyhow.

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying-out of gardens.

A day is a more magnificent cloth than any muslin, the mechanism that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you shall not conceal the sleezy, fraudulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the piece, nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter ste.

'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

I consider lace to be one of the prettiest imitations ever made of the fantasy of nature

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

The Creator made Italy with designs by Michelangelo.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.