Technique Quotes

“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”
― Jacques Ellul

“I used to murder people for money, but these days it’s more of a survival technique.”
― Jennifer Estep, Widow's Web

“A movie: tells the story; of a person(s); in the pursuit of an Objective(s); in the face of Opposition(s); with someone to talk to; with an underlying theme, in a clearly defined genre; with an emotionally satisfying resolution. Does yours?”
― Dan Joseph Decker, ANATOMY OF A SCREENPLAY THIRD EDITION

“I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it.

But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“When, taking all factors into account, anything can be proved to be impossible, that usually means that it will be done in some different manner and employing a new and unforeseen technique.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Interplanetary Flight

“Technical civilization has made the great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact.”
― Jacques Ellul

“The best way for a critic to fight against bad art is to keep it a secret.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Great teaching is the ability to distinguish between what can and needs to be explained and what cannot be explained. The working of a computer needs to be explained as it is made by the human mind. But a butterfly need not always be explained. A butterfly has to be seen with gleaming eyes of wonder as it is a natural expression of life and not of the mind. Great teaching is more like a craft than a technique. To evoke the curiosity in the learner, to care for the learner and to take the learner on a journey of discovery are some of the most critical elements of this craft.”
― Debashis Chatterjee, Can You Teach A Zebra Some Algebra?

“Let's talk now about practice and process. You practice technique to get your fingers where you want them to go. You practice theory to understand where they can go and why.

You play live and write songs. You practice that to bring the theory and the technique and create art with it. And you seek inspiration to make that art something that's meaningful to you and you can communicate to others.”
― Tom Morello

“Intimidation," she told me, amused by my repulsion.

"Men abandon battle when they see their own fates in these ruined faces”
― Rin Chupeco

“Style in dancing, as in everything else in life, is immensely more important than technique.”
― Clifton Webb, Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb

“A common psychological technique to alienate people is to ignore them!”
― Steven Magee

“When mastering drapery drawings in Verrocchio's studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the 'modern manner' in painting, and the art historian Ernst Gombrich called sfumato 'Leonardo's famous invention, the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form to merge with another and always leave something to our imagination.' The term 'sfumato' derives from the Italian word for 'smoke,' or more precisely the dissipation and gradual vanishing of smoke into thin air . . . With no sharp lines, enigmatic glances and smiles can flicker mysteriously.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

“Many writers, good writers who ought to know better, focus so tightly on the structure demanded by a crime story that they lose track of the fact that they are writing a novel. Accusations of both sensationalism and trivialisation are, alas, often justified.”
― Laurie R. King, The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing

“One of the joys of reading as a writer is that your eye becomes educated: yes, you may become more critical and abandon a higher percentage of novels halfway through, but when a writer gets it really right, the pleasure and admiration can be all the more intense.”
― Michelle Spring, The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing

“L'homme, même physique, ne se limite pas à son organisme. L'homme ayant prolongé ses organes par des outils, ne voit dans son corps que le moyen de tous les moyens d'actions possibles. C'est donc au-delà du corps qu'il faut regarder pour apprécier ce qui est normal ou pathologique pour ce corps même. Avec une infirmité comme l'astigmatisme ou la myopie on serait normal dans une société agricole ou pastorale, mais on est anormal dans la marine ou dans l'aviation. Donc on ne comprend bien comment, dans les milieux propres à l'homme, le même homme se trouve à des moments différents normal ou anormal, ayant les mêmes organes, que si l'on comprend comment la vitalité organique s'épanouit chez l'homme en plasticité technique et en avidité de domination du milieu.”
― Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological

“Her playing which had been superb became merely correct. It was necessary to suggest a certain sloppiness, the playing of something that hadn't been written. Computer-made music-synthesized Blue Moon- presented same problem. Random elements introduced.”
― John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

“You learn techniques to understand principles. When you understand the principles, you will create your own techniques.”
― Alain Gehin

“It is worthy to know the techniques than to know the technology”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Assholes use closers.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“…to incrementally condense the external manifestation of the technique, while keeping true to its essence. Over time, expansiveness decreases, while potency increases. I call this method ‘making smaller circles.”
― Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

“The artist knows total dependence on the unseen reality. The paradox is that the creative process is incomplete unless the artist is, in the best and most proper sense of the word, a technician, one who knows the tools of his trade, has studied his techniques, is disciplined. One writer said, “If I leave my work for a day, it leaves me for three.” I think it was Artur Rubinstein who admitted, “If I don’t practice the piano for one day I know it. If I don’t practice it for two days my family knows it. If I don’t practice it for three days, my public knows it.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life

“A certain pleasure was added to Grace’s relief at establishing herself as a migratory bird. She found that she understood the characters in her novel. Her words flowed, she was excited, she could see everyone and everything.”
― Janet Frame, Towards Another Summer

“There is a lot of hazardous information emerging about the earthing health technique and I do not do it, other than walking barefoot in nature, well away from electricity sources.”
― Steven Magee

“What she wanted was technique. She wanted to paint like a Renaissance old master. She wanted to know what color Titian tinted his canvas before he started working on it. She wanted to know what colors Caravaggio mixed to make his lights. She wanted to know exactly which pigments Rubens utilized to achieve those juicy fleshy tones, what brown Rembrandt used in his shadows, what combination of oils and resins went into Vermeer's painting medium. She wanted someone to show her how to make Raphael's line and Michelangelo's muscle masses. She wanted to know what made a good composition, and what made a bad one. She wanted to know.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light

“Depuis la révolution numérique, et peut-être même depuis la révolution industrielle, nous sommes des papillons de nuit fonçant vers une flamme. L’accélération civilisationnelle par la technologie est un progrès sans retour d’expérience du temps. Directement de l’iPad à l’Ehpad.”
― Fabien Maréchal, L'Attendeur (de Première classe)

“No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has
been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has
set out at tremendous speed- to go nowhere.”
― Jacques Ellul