A Quote by Zadie Smith

150 years ago in [Charles] Dickens's time there was at least a sense of craft. So some of the things people had inside of them, they had the possibility of expressing in the making of things - even in a daily way with their clothes or their food. People made a good deal of both themselves. Now our daily lives are almost all consumption. Craft plays a tiny role.
You need to work at the craft of songwriting, but not only the craft. When I see people working both on themselves and the craft, and they combine those things...I just go, That's just fabulous.
Food trends don't just drive the obvious things, like cupcakes or cronuts, but something as elemental as your daily cup of coffee. The way you have that coffee now is probably very different from the way you had it ten years ago, and it'll probably be very different in ten years. That has a huge impact, culturally and economically.
We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our important daily tasks, just as the priest-perhaps reading the Bible-passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised in our lives to show us that God’s way, and not our own, is what counts.
I think people at least now, as opposed to ten-15-20 years ago, kind of get it, what is the bad food. I think, before, there was a time when they didn't even get it that processed food was hurting them. Now, I think they get that, but the big enemies to switching over to good food are convenience.
The difference between art and craft lies not in the tools you hold in your hands, but in the mental set that guides them. For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.
I had some early success with my first film and since then it's been a grind. It's clearly a craft that I love, and a craft that I work on constantly, but after so many years, I didn't feel like I had much to show for that.
Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored.
I still have the first bottle opener I made on my MakerBot. Things you fabricate are things you care more about. I think there will always be people who go and buy crap at the dollar store. But I think it is cool when people craft things themselves.
Of course, you can't teach songwriting. You can only encourage people to do it and help them to sort out for themselves what they want to achieve, and get a list of exercises together that improves the craft and gives them more access to the craft of writing good songs.
Two hundred years ago, we were all busy farming and we all had a role to play. The home was a unit of production. We made food and all the things we needed, we took care of our kids and were connected to purpose in our evolution. When the Industrial Revolution came along, it took away a lot of the work the men had done.
Of all the things about de Sade, I would argue he is funny. A lot of people didn't understand de Sade. No. 1, he is a very good writer, and No. 2, he had the courage to talk about a lot of things that in public, even now, almost nobody has the courage to talk about. He would do it with a kind of funny way - not the stories themselves, but the way he tells them. He is never serious.
I think that there's a sense of self-reliance that exists in skateboarding that kids can take to their daily lives. I think there's also a sense of creativity and community-based goals - in skating, even though it is an individual pursuit, a lot of things that you learn are things that you borrow and expand from other people's ideas. I call skating a combined evolution - it's individual, it's artistic, but at the time, there is a communal push to keep doing your thing. And a sense of camaraderie in that.
People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.
He had been through a good deal in the course of the Great Quest — he had seen beautiful things and horrible things — but up until now he had not known that one and the same creature can be both, that beauty can be terrifying.
We have some role in almost everything that happens in our lives. When "bad" things happen, the mistake is not in the role, but in calling them bad. For in calling them bad, we call ourselves bad, since we had a role in their creation. We then have only two choices: blame ourselves, or disown our creative power, neither of which is congruent with our highest purpose.
We were advised that nobody could stop us from pursuing our craft simply because we had honed, or even developed that craft while working at a company.
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