Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Infringe upon the rights of no one. Borrow no tool but what you will return according to promise. Take no wood, nor anything else but what belongs to you – and if you find anything that is not your own, do not hide it away, but report it, that the owner may be found.
Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.
Just as our ancient ancestors drew animals on cave walls and carved animals from wood and bone, we decorate our homes with animal prints and motifs, give our children stuffed animals to clutch, cartoon animals to watch, animal stories to read.
I hate thinking about writer’s block! I don’t have writer’s block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it’s usually because I haven’t done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.
My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
Ah, the power of two. There’s nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons?
You know, for most of its life bluegrass has had this stigma of being all straw hats and hay bales and not necessarily the most sophisticated form of music. Yet you can’t help responding to its honesty. It’s music that finds its way deep into your soul because it’s strings vibrating against wood and nothing else.
I kind of have my little OCD wood shed at my house where everything is just right when I go write.
I remember when Victoria Wood started to come through, and I thought she was great, though she and I are very different in our approach.
Wood pellet grilling could potentially have a lower risk of cancer when compared to other forms of grilling, as some people say that it leads to the creation of fewer carcinogens.
My teeth have never been touched. Why did I tell you that? Knock on wood. I’ve got a few scars over the eyes, a couple on the chin, a few on the beak and one across the cheek. But my luck is running out.
I alternate between a few scents. I love ‘Oribe Cote d’Azur Eau de Parfum’ and both the ‘Wild Bluebell’ and ‘Wood Sage & Sea Salt Colognes’ by Jo Malone.
I’ve never been one of those actors who plays chess with his career and goes, ‘I’m going to wait now and see what project comes up that can move me to this or that level.’ I take stuff as it comes, and it just so happens that it hasn’t dried up yet, touch wood.
Simon Hale, the British arranger, does all string and wood arrangements on my records.
With the kids around, this is a different world to me. I spend a lot of time with them till they go to their playschool. I wake up early, have breakfast with them. I come back from work and am with them again till they go to bed by 10 P.M. Touch wood, this is what I wanted always.
I think it was John who really urged me to play sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood,’ which was the first time we used it. Now, Paul has just asked me recently whether I’d written any more of those ‘Indian type of tunes.’ He suddenly likes them now. But at the time, he wouldn’t play on them.
Remember, a chip on the shoulder is a sure sign of wood higher up.
I’ve always been criticised for how filthy my material is. Victoria Wood said to me once, ‘I wish I was a bit ruder, like you,’ and I said, ‘Well, I wish I was a bit cleaner, like you.’
I got my first real bass guitar in my hands when I was 14 – a 1957 Fender Precision, which is still hanging on the wall in my front room. I loved the heaviness of it and the feel of the wood. I still do.
I love the Memphis sound. When I was 16-and-a-half, with my driver’s permit, I was playing New Jersey clubs in a 10-piece band; we had a horn section and would play great, great songs like ‘Hold On! I’m Comin” and ‘Knock on Wood’ and ‘Midnight Hour.’
I met Elijah Wood once, I met Peter Jackson, I met Orlando Bloom, and they’re all really cool.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
I’ve made great friends through acting. When I’m with Victoria Wood and Julie Walters, we have grand fun. We can make each other howl with laughter because we know each other so well.
A word is an arbitrary label – that’s the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don’t snicker: Would you ever say, ‘Nothing has gone wrong yet’ without looking for wood to knock?
One summer, when I was elementary-school age, my neighbors and I built guitars and keyboards out of scrap wood, painted them in bright colors, and formed the cover band Lil’ ‘D’ Duran Duran. We didn’t make our own noise or even pretend to play our fake instruments.
I thought of America as Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner sprawled on the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool biting into the same red apple.
I remember going to ‘The Wood’ and leaving my friend and my mom, who I came with, to go sit in the front row because I was so excited.
Knock wood, but I started acting professionally when I was 16, and I’ve always been able to support myself since then.
When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.
Bent metal is worse than bent wood and weight for weight is more flexible.
I grew up in a wood cabin on Puget Sound in Manchester, Wash. My family taught me to appreciate the arts and the outdoors, and I still yearn for the absolute silence I experienced there when I was young.
Most viscose rayon is made from wood pulp, but the process of making it typically uses so many chemicals in such vast quantities that some experts said it shouldn’t really count as a natural plant fiber.
You’d never look at a Rembrandt and say, ‘That’s just wood and canvas and paint – how much?!’ It’s all about how many people want it. It works on a pair of jeans as well – they’re just material and stitching, and as soon as you walk out of the shop, they’re worth nothing.
The whole wood seemed running now, running hard, hunting, chasing, closing in round something or – somebody? In panic, he began to run too, aimlessly, he knew not whither.
I was in a movie called ‘Twister,’ and in it, I had to hit a golf ball off of a roof with a driving wood. The guy who owned the place where we shot showed me how to do it, and I hit the ball about 150 yards.
I think there can be no replacement for teaching people how to make things by showing them how to stick two pieces of wood together.
Comics are so full of amazing work. And I can’t look at a drawing of a woman without thinking of, for instance, Wallace Wood and his amazing way of capturing beauty.
I actually have a pig collection in my cabin: all types of old wood hand-carved pigs that my mom started for me as a housewarming gift.
Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.
I don’t take myself seriously in the slightest, so it does amaze me that I’ve ended up being in all these very dark, sinister plays. But I love it because, touch wood, I’m lucky enough not to have that level of darkness in my life.
I would like to go to Kalimantan island in Sumatra to see the carvings and longhouse sculptures. I’ve also always wanted to look at the wood carvings along the Sepik River in New Guinea.
I think the players, I put in the book for example that we should go back to wood rackets, probably they laughed at me, I’m a dinosaur, but I think that you see these great players, have even more variety and you see more strategy, there’d be more subtlety.
One day I decided to go to a hardware store – I picked up six pieces of wood, a hammer and nails, and built a box. It probably sounded useless at the time but its taken me to where I am today, and its been well received from drummers and percussionists like Josh Devine from One Direction and Robbie Williams drummer.
My plan is to open five restaurants based on the five elements in Chinese philosophy: wood, water, fire, earth and metal.
There is a special sensation in getting good wood on the ball and driving a double down the left-field line as the crowd in the ballpark rises to its feet and cheers. But, I also remember how much fun I had as a skinny barefoot kid hitting a tennis ball with a broomstick on a quiet, dusty street in Panama.
I adored ‘The Young Ones,’ then I grew into ‘French and Saunders’ and Victoria Wood.
A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.
