Alexander Pope Quotes

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

Art can't be taught; passion can't be taught; discipline can't be taught; but craft can be taught. And writing is both an art and a craft.

Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills.

The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

Art without technique is invertebrate, shapeless, characterless.

I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

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.

Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.

To really have craft, you must be able to repeat something as one has to do in films.

When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists.

I know how to paint... In a way there is a boredom there because a lot of the magic is gone.

Ideally, writing ought to be like riding a bicycle: something you know how to do without having to think consciously about exactly what it is that you are doing.

Being an architect is like playing piano, you learn to play to admire how well the other guys play piano.

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.

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

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind's eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence.

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.

Such is the strength of art, rough things to shape.

It's not in the draftsmanship, it's in the man. Like I say, a tool is dead. A brush is a dead object. It's in the man. If you want to do it, you do it.

The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.

Art lies in concealing art.

In love-making, as in other arts, those who do it best cannot tell how it is done.