Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

Hands make the world each day.

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

I like to just make things... If I have the TV on, I'm not just going to sit there. I want to do something with my hands; I've always got a project. Or I get a small group of people over, and I say, 'Let's make these things today.'

I took a break after 'Confessions.' I was real picky. And then I suddenly realized I hadn't worked in a year. And I was sort of, like, not really happy. I think people are happier when they have structure, you know? You realize that as you get older. You have to have rituals and structure.

Knitters use knitting to value-add to the world.

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

The everyday cares and duties, which men call drudgery, are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon its wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move the clock stands still.

When I arrive in Los Angeles in the entertainment community, and I use implements like a shovel and a hammer, our society has distanced itself so far from working with its hands that those incredibly pedestrian skills are perceived as somehow being extraordinary.

Let me not forget the use of my own hands, that of a craftsman with eyes... that reflect the technology around me.

What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.

Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.

All creative work begins by doing something with the hands. Creation is simply a problem and design is the way out.

I love being around people who work with their hands, who do the hard things to keep our country going. They're just my kind of people.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

I have always regarded manual labour as creative and looked with respect-and, yes, wonder-at people who work with their hands. It seems to me that their creativity is no less than that of a violinist or painter.

I write on the typewriter. I like it because I like the feeling of making something with my hands. I like pressing the key and a letter comes up and is printed on a piece of paper. I can understand that.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.

The product of the head, heart and hand is a thing to be loved.

Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.

While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can't discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn't really matter.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.