John Grogan Quotes

I'm better with my hands, and I always loved the slightly romantic idea of starting with bits of wood and being able to create something to sit on, to eat from, to store your clothes in.

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

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself.

In Scotland, I have a huge barn full of woodworking tools. I love working with my hands. I basically just make myself bleed a lot. I'm very accident-prone.

I've always built furniture and done farm work.

I'd love to be a joiner or a wood turner.

My father is a very skilled carpenter. He can do just about anything with his hands. He is very artistic with his carpentry.

My passion is interior decorating. My goal for the next years is to get into carpentry, because I really want to learn how to make my own furniture.

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.

When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.

I don't make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture.

When I got to Los Angeles, I started building cabins in peoples' yards, building post-and-beam structures and cutting the joinery for those.

But by the time you get there and you get home, it winds up being a lot of time out. So I'm getting the itch to build, I know that. I keep looking at my stacks of wood and what I can do with it.

I grew up in a craftsman's home, where things were done with our own hands. I did cabinetmaking for four years and I hated it.

I love beautiful wood.

My father was very much a handy person round the house, and I learnt a lot of carpentry from him.

I enjoyed carpentry, and it was very good to me for 12 years.

I do think a carpenter needs a good hammer to bang in the nail.

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.

My talents do not lie in DIY.

You know, even working actors can end up having a lot of spare time. And you can either go sit at the Starbucks and wait for your agent to call you, or you can go learn how to build a Shaker blanket chest with hand-cut dovetails.

I learned construction and carpentry from my father at a young age, so I felt very comfortable and I felt very satisfied when I worked in that field.

Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.

I spend a lot of time doing carpentry. Sometimes there is nothing that gives me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does.