Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist.

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

I know a lot of people who are very good at their craft who have learned - people behind the camera - who really have a lot to offer because they know what they're doing, they know what to do, they've made their mistakes.

Producing is just a big learning experience.

Every picture has been a learning opportunity for me.

In any of the arts, you never stop learning.

I think everything that you do, you're learning. I mean, every movie that you make is like a film school; that's one of the things that I enjoy about filmmaking.

As an actor, you have an accumulated knowledge base. But there's also something about it that every time you really feel like you're doing it for the first time; you have no idea whether you're capable of it.

All we do as songwriters is rewrite the songs that have impressed us till we find our own voice. It's part of learning the craft.

I'm still learning my craft.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

I've always believed that you have to have the skills before you destroy the skills. If you want to be crude, be crude, but don't be crude because you don't know how to do it, because you're not perfect at drawing and pattern-cutting.

It is all about technique. The great mistake of this century is to put inspiration and creativity first.

It takes skill to bring something you've imagined into the world: to use words to create believable lives, to select the colors and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavorful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repitition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time. . . . If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

I've said before that every craftsman searches for what's not there to practice his craft.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

I'm always interested in craft and I was interested to see how people work. For me, it's a little like lessons at school.

I consider myself more a craftsman than an artist.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.

If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.

Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.