Crafts Quotes - Page 29

• Sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush toward global destruction what the monasteries were to the Dark Ages: places to preserve human skills and crafts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose returns to the public mind.

  Gene Logsdon

  Dark, Common Purpose, Skills

  Gene Logsdon (2000). “Living at Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream”, p.13, Chelsea Green Publishing

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• Writing is not magic. It’s a craft, a process, a set of steps. As with any process, things sometimes break down. Even in a good story, the writer runs into problems. So the act of writing always includes problem solving.

  Roy Peter Clark

  Running, Writing, Magic

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• The more I grew as a human being, the better I became at my craft.

  R.A. Dickey

  Grew, Humans, Human Beings

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• Don't be too precious about your craft... there's only 26 letters and 12 notes, and Shakespeare and Beethoven said it all better than any of us ever will

  David Foster

  Letters, Notes, Said

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• The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them.

  Steven Pressfield

  War, Doe, Gone

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• 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

  Beautiful, Hard Work, Writing

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• And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world - a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port.

  Michel Foucault

  Spiritual, Ignorance, Anchors

  Michel Foucault (2013). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.12, Vintage

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• Street performers, homemade crafts, keep your wallet in your front pocket and don't buy any crap!

  Camryn Manheim

  Venice, Pockets, Wallets

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• . . . as far as the regime is concerned, well, the play is sheer terror for them. Because they feel, How dare - how dare anybody lift his or her voice in criticism against us? We have the guns. Their level of paranoia and power-drunkenness is unbelievable.

  Wole Soyinka

  Gun, Play, Voice

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• One of the things about what . . . I do - writing plays - is that a poll is not taken before you say, Well, I'm going to write this because I think that you're going to like this and therefore you'll buy a ticket for this.

  Wendy Wasserstein

  Taken, Writing, Thinking

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• The first several scenes are about sexual addiction. They're not specifically political at all... I didn't sit down and think, ''I am going to write something about the religious right.'' I started out by writing something about sexual addiction, and it evolved... I don't look at a calendar and say: ''Oh! There's going to be an election in 1996. I think now, in 1993, I'll start writing a play that'll be ready for it.''

  Christopher Durang

  Religious, Writing, Thinking

  "Of Plays About Politics And Politicians at Play". Interview with Wendy Wasserstein, www.nytimes.com. October 6, 1996.

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• [Henry] James is much more complex than Jane Austen. That's why it's not so easy to adapt him. People expect a nice period piece, but that's not always the case. There's a deep human mystery in his work.

  Agnieszka Holland

  Nice, People, Pieces

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• [Using humor to explore serious issues] disarms people. It's a way in. It's gentle, but at the same time it's subversive, and I like that duality.

  Lisa Loomer

  Issues, People, Way

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• I now know that to do a worthwhile family history I must interpret the past without falling into either demonizing or unquestioning acceptance. . . . As a playwright, what I object to right now is any form of fundamentalism, whether it's nationalistic, religious or ethnic. . . . I think it is ridiculous - and fundamentalist, by the way - to say that I am not changed by the culture around me.

  David Henry Hwang

  Religious, Fall, Acceptance

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• The most important playwright's gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.

  David Hare

  Important, Speak, Playwright

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• On their own, each [character] is a victim of no importance. But when you bring them together, they become a dangerous weapon. Jeanne is the vowel and Sophie the consonant. Psychologists know this phenomenon well. Each individual is harmless, but together they create an explosive chemical reaction. It's like Bonnie and Clyde, like Thelma and Louise.

  Claude Chabrol

  Character, Together, Sophie

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• I was not interested in doing the plot of Oedipus in blackface. I did wonder, what would these people have been like if they hadn't been in that situation?... One could look at Oedipus, or at my character Augustus, as a cynical schemer who did everything because he was hungry for power. But that's just too easy. I'm more interested in how humans can embody conflicting goals and emotions.

  Rita Dove

  Character, Oedipus, People

  "The darker face of the earth". American Theatre, November 1, 1996.

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• At best, the relationship between drama critic and playwright is a pretty twiggy affair. When I'm asked whom I write for, after the obligatory, I write only for myself, I realize that I have an imaginary circle of peers - writers and respected or savvy theatre folk, some dramatic writers and some not, some living, some long gone. . . . Often a writer is aware as he works that a certain critic is going to hate this one. . . . You don't let what a critic might say worry you or alter your work; it might even add a spark to the gleeful process of creation.

  Lanford Wilson

  Hate, Drama, Writing

  "The Critic On My Shoulder" by Lanford Wilson, www.nytimes.com. December 29, 1996.

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• I thought if I can do something more playful and light like my play BEYOND THERAPY, it might be a money maker. I think one of the reasons BEYOND THERAPY has legs - it's been very successful for me around the country - is because it's a friendly play, rather sunny.

  Christopher Durang

  Country, Successful, Thinking

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• I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.

  Edward Albee

  Fashion, Writing, Years

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• And how deeply do I let business considerations affect [screenwriting] choices that might otherwise be more or less esthetic? . . . Do I choose the upbeat rather than the downer ending because I know it will score better at the preview? Can the idea be sold in a single sentence? Can it compete with space aliens and tornadoes and missions impossible?

  Edward Zwick

  Ideas, Space, Choices

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• The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, People, Political

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• I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.

  August Wilson

  Mother, Song, Art

  August Wilson (1997). “Seven Guitars”, p.10, Penguin

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• If this were a [Hollywood] studio film, I wouldn't have pushed my father into a table, I would have beat him up. My father wouldn't have kissed my girlfriend; he would have raped her.

  Noah Wyle

  Girlfriend, Father, Hollywood

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• What was once a cottage industry dedicated to the discovery and development of new voices and works has become instead the raison d'etre for many a playwright's existence . . .. And since readings have become playwrights' main source of exposure, the nature of playwriting has changed to fit readings' needs. Investigation into what is eminently theatrical has been substituted - more and more these days - by what can simply come across and read well.

  Caridad Svich

  Reading, Discovery, Voice

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