“Good craftsmen are not expressing themselves. They’re expressing something outside themselves. In that sense, craft is not about selfhood. When somebody declares to you, ‘I feel I have a novel in me, but of course at the moment I’m working in advertising,’ you know that person is never going to be an artist. ‘I have this novel hidden inside myself, I’m an artist without an art.’ I don’t believe that sort of thing. And I don’t believe in the ethos of personal creativity. You either do it or you don’t.”
Richard Sennett, interviewed by Tim Black (“The Intimate Lives of Others,” Spiked, January 2016)