Among others there are three methods for shaping shells: the freely shaped hill, the membrane under pressure and the hanging cloth reversed.

We shape the telling to fit the substance, rework the substance to support the design.

If you take a glass bottle and toss it up into the air so that when it hits the earth it shatters against the ground, and then you take the shards and glue them back together in the shape of a bird, then you no longer have a bottle, you’ve made something new. Any parts of my personal history I use in my fiction are only interesting to me as the rawest of raw material that I’m shaping into the form of a bird.

Adopt the character of the twisting octopus, which takes on the appearance of the nearby rock. Now follow in this direction, now turn a different hue.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank And fitted it, head and haft.

Think from outside the box, collapse the box and take a fucking knife to it.

I am willing to put the case into any shape you choose.

I make a 3-D vessel form out of fabric – something I learned at the workshop last summer. I sew the form and then stuff it with perlite (the little white stones in potting soil) and sculpt it.

Take an orange and draw something on it -- say, a human face. Now carefully remove the peel, trying to keep it in one piece, and flatten it against your kitchen table. You'll see that in making a two-dimensional object out of a round one, something has to give. Either the face gets distorted and looks all 'mushed out,' or in flattening the peel, it breaks into segments, dividing the face as well into several parts. A cartographer chooses between a series of those kind of lesser-of-two-evils alternatives.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

I want to shape the TV screen canvas

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

The shapes they take are both objective and subjective. One can shape them a little with one's own mind.

I don’t like my circle of friends, so I’m changing them to a square. Love shapes our lives, so why not shape who we love?