Alice Sebold Quotes

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

I doubt Picasso ever painted a picture in an hour, he took his time, looked at every detail and made sure it was perfect.

The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spiderweb of the micrometer.

My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.

There's a feeling about it. You feel almost like a cabinetmaker, laying planks. There's a real feeling when you know you're getting it right. It's a physical feeling.

When I was a carpenter, I once worked with this Russian lady architect. I would tell her, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I want to change that a half inch,’ and she would say, ‘No limit for better.’ I think that is a worthy credo. You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.

Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right.

The audience loves it when you pay attention to details.

There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.

Ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of beauty.

What we make testifies who we are. People can sense care and can sense carelessness.

To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal. You require absolute control and professionalism.

Pretty Polynesian baby over the sea, I remember the night, when we walked in the sands of Waikiki and I held you oh so tight.

Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can assume great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became “geniuses” (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

After all, when we were children, when things went wrong, there wasn’t much we could do to help put it right. But now we’re adults, now we can. That’s the thing, you see? Look at us, Akira. After all this time, we can finally put things right. Remember, old chap, how we used to play those games? Over and over? How we used to pretend we were detectives searching for my father? Now we’re grown, we can at last put things right.

One must be strict even in little things.

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

You don’t try to build a wall, you don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there… You say ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ And you do that every single day and soon you have a wall.

Fatherhood changes you completely. If things didn't go my way before, I became withdrawn and didn't want to see or listen to anyone. Now, when I arrive home, I see my son and everything is OK. He's the most important thing to me now.

Quality and perfection are achieved with time. You do not create a perfect painting or a perfect poem by hurrying. Time is always coming.

Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.

You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.

In my work I try to get things right, to do it well, and if there are specific skills involved - like in a case conducting or playing the piano, or in this film I have coming up where I play a character who is German - I'm very meticulous about learning accents and dialects and those kinds of things. That's probably the closest I come to being a perfectionist.

I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.