Michael Bastian Quotes

My father was a very good craftsman. He made furniture, he made silverware and he had an incredible gift in terms of how you can make something yourself.

The way I grew up, everyone knew how to cook, sew... carpentry.

I'm amazed now whenever I go back to London. I'm like, 'Wow. I used to kind of swing up these streets when I knew how this machine worked.' And then when you don't, you lose that. You need to get your license back. I do know how to plant a garden and keep chickens, but I don't know how to do much else.

I was raised on farms by people who didn't have Wal-Mart. They had to make their own sleds, harnesses, clothing, etc.

You'd be waiting 30 or 40 years for me to build a table. I have more than two left hands.

The only person I never made a hat for was my mother because my mother didn't really - she preferred to make her own hats. I mean, she was intrigued by everything, but she didn't want one of my hats. She made her own.

I get around OK with a toolbox. As a kid, I picked up skills following my dad through the oil fields of Oklahoma and West Texas. My wife Janine is hard to impress, but she does think it's cool when I fix things around the house.

I have to say that it was working with my grandpa, who grew up on a farm in Mountain Home, Idaho, that had the most influence. Witnessing his work ethic and hearing his stories gave me an appreciation for the farm's best lessons.

I paid my way through college as a carpenter and a woodworker. So I've built the house I live in and most of the furniture that's in it, and I do a lot of woodworking still.

Actors are the most generous people when it comes to sharing their technique. But if you grew up in a household of carpenters, and you're making a table, everyone would have a different way of doing it.

Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.

Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things with their hands.

Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it.

I do needlepoint from kits. I give them as gifts to people in the form of cushion covers and they are often speechless with horror.

I think the reason for my fascination with craft is what it represents, what it means in our culture, what it means in our history and in humanity. It was the idea that you could go to your butcher to get something, you could go to your tailor to get this, and you could go to your cobbler to get that.

A lot of people like cabinet making; people are intrigued by it. Women in particular like cabinet making. They like it more than men do - the men are not really interested in the cabinet making.

It has long been a childhood dream of mine to have a farm.

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

I sew my own shoes. Other male dancers don't, but I like it one way, and I've learned to do it that way.

It is sometimes easier to have furniture made than to find things.

I like to work a lot with wood. I make furniture that falls apart. I also sew.

I first fell in love with comedy when I'd visit my granny as a kid. Trips to her house meant staying up late drinking Coca-Cola and watching 'Saturday Night Live'.

We didn't have electricity when I was a kid. We had to watch TV by candlelight. No, that's a silly joke.

So much of my background is about making: physically doing it myself.

I have no interest in a guy who doesn't know the right end of a screwdriver.