What is a workman without his tooles? – Proverb quoted by Heywood, 1546

Blunt tools are sometimes found of use where sharper instruments would fail. – Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge [plain-speaking, candor —tεᖇ&#55

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry…. Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work… – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, interview, The Paris Review, 1981

For a craftsman like my father, nothing is more exasperating than to witness tool abuse. In particular, I remember a steel tape measure he gave me after I had somehow managed to lose the first twelve inches of it. – Richard Menzies, “If I Were A Carpenter,” RDMenzies.com, 2011