Mark Frauenfelder

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“The best results always come when you’re focusing on nothing but execution and letting the results just happen as they will.”

Tom Lehman

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“Slowly now, nice neat letters:
the point is to do things well,
not just to do them.”

Antonio Machado

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“There is difficulty involved in going from the basic sentence that’s headed in the right direction to making a fine sentence. But it’s a joyous task. It’s hard, but it’s joyous. Being raised rural, I think work is its own satisfaction. It’s not seen as onerous, or a dreadful fate. It’s like building a mill or a bridge or sewing a fine garment or chopping wood—there’s a pleasure in constructing something that really works.”

Annie Proulx

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“Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.”

Anthony Shadid

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“The need for success and the fear of failure are two aspects of the same inner attitude. For it isn’t failure that causes the sinking sensation we all know, but the fear of failure. Failure isn’t the enemy—fear is. One learns, after all, by failing. This is elementary; we all know it, except when it applies to ourselves…”

Carla Needleman

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“I think of my work as what used to be called women’s work: knitting, quilting. Women were busy cooking, raising children, so they had to have an activity that they could pick up and put down. A quilt may take a year, but if you just keep doing it, you get a quilt. Or if you knit one and pearl two, and you believe in the process, eventually you’ll make a sweater. There’s some aspect of that in me.”

Chuck Close

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“I would like to make solid wood clocks if the opportunity came up. I like glue, and I like to cut with saws.”

Bob Dylan

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“Making something to hold out of a very hard material that feels so soft is a slow and rather good tactile pun.”

Edmund de Waal

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“I have made many, many thousands of pots. I am very bad at names, I mumble and fudge, but I am good on pots. I can remember the weight and the balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume. I can read how an edge creates tension or loses it. I can feel if it has been made at speed or with diligence. If it has warmth.”

Edmund de Waal

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“I didn’t know what I could or couldn’t do and therefore thought I could do anything. In this sense, I was a person that did what I didn’t know I couldn’t do.”

Eriko Horiki

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“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry…Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work are involved.”

Gabriel García Márquez

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“When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.”

Saul Bellow

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“A craft is a kingdom!”

Proverb

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