A Quote by Jacques Barzun

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

Jacques Barzun

Quote Topics

Art Aspiring Best Craft Difficult Learn Least Most Unique Writing

Quote Author

Jacques Barzun
American - Educator
November 30, 1907 - October 25, 2012

The best advice I can give to any aspiring author is to write every single day. Work at the craft of writing. Take it seriously.

Andrea Davis Pinkney

Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best.

Walter Darby Bannard

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

Alan Lightman

The most important advice I can offer is that writing is a craft that you can learn by practicing. If you keep writing, you will improve.

Lauren Tarshis

Like most art forms, writing is part instinct and part craft. The craft part is the part that can be taught, and that can make a crucial difference to lots of writers.

Matt Haig

Writing for publication is an art, a craft, and a business, so you need to develop skill sets in multiple areas. You need to learn how to be a marketer just as much as you need to get past your influences and develop your unique prose voice. And you can't do it alone. You need a strong emotional support system to help cope with the frustrations and setbacks.

Brian Hodge

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.

Alexandra Fuller

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

Garth Stein

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.

David Bayles

The advice that I can give anyone wanting to be in the biz: do all the work, learn your craft. There are no shortcuts. If you stay with it, you will get an opportunity. Whether you make the most of an opportunity depends on if you are prepared. Learn your craft, every aspect of it. Eat it, drink it, sleep it, then when you are the most prepared, you can make the most of it.

Christopher Judge

The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol.

Hilda Doolittle

There are as many routes to writing success as there are writers who got there. My advice, however, applies across the board: read widely, learn the craft by whatever means you can - workshops and writing programs are ideal, but even self-study can work - apply what you learn, and persevere.

Therese Fowler

If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.