Design Feast Series: Quotes

“Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

J. D. Salinger, Novelist

“I just keep my head down and try to accomplish what my parents set out for me: that there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do. But I also look up periodically and think, ‘Who else can I pull along?’ Because it’s a failure if I’m up here by myself.”

Gwen Ifill, Journalist, Television Newscaster, Author

“Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Novelist, Short Story Writer

“Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values. Story homogenizes us; it makes us one.”

Jonathan Gottschall, Literary Critic, Author

“The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.”

Raymond Chandler, Author

“Home ought to be our clearing house, the place from which we go forth lessoned and disciplined, and ready for life.”

Kathleen Norris, Novelist, Newspaper Columnist

“Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.”

Brian Eno, Musician, Composer, Record Producer

“The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.”

Peter Ustinov, Actor, Author, Theater and Opera Director

“I feel that my job is to create an atmosphere where creative people can do their best work. In other words, I have to create an atmosphere where these people feel safe, where they feel respected, and where they feel that they can contribute.”

John Frankenheimer, Film, Television Director

“What makes art interesting is the fact that anyone can realize it as soon as the idea has been formulated. That’s the point.”

Lawrence Weiner, Artist

“I just try to express the art and work to get better, to learn more, get sharper, inspire and put things out that people are going to feel good about—feel good and sexy, and the things I feel when I’m making it.”

Anderson .Paak, Singer-Songwriter, Rapper, Producer

“A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”

Virginia Woolf, Novelist, Dramatist

“The beauty of innovation is that once the technology and tools are widely available, people with every possible insight and point of view start working on solutions to problems others can’t even see. Ultimately, it’s the way human beings, with our vast stores of ingenuity, deploy the power of the technology and tools that makes the biggest difference.”

Bill Gates, Co-Founder, Microsoft,
Philanthropist, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

“But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it.”

T. C. Boyle, Author

“Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”

George Saunders, Author

“I never thought about not making it. But the ‘it’ had nothing to do with show business. The ‘it’ I’m trying to make is me.”

Richard Pryor, Comedian, Actor, Producer, Screenwriter

“I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.”

Margaret Atwood, Novelist, Poet

“I think with my hands. I design things to be touched—not for a museum. A piece is ready when it has the shape of something to cherish.”

Eva Zeisel, Eva Zeisel, Industrial Designer

“I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand—in addition to how much it slows you down—is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.”

John Irving, Novelist

“Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.”

Katherine Paterson, Novelist

“The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.”

Moss Hart, Playwright

“We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.”

Georges Bataille, Author

“History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.”

Jared Diamond, Evolutionary Biologist, Author

“No one is going to give a damn about your résumé; they want to see what you have made with your own little fingers.”

David Carr, Journalist

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”

Oliver Sacks, Neurologist, Author

“I want people to see that I’m being really honest, and 100-percent just doing me all the time, and everything that I’ve put out, I’ve made it: I’ve been involved in the production, I’ve written it, I’ve come up with the concept of the video, I’ve picked who’s going to be in it, everything down to the glove the dancer on the right is wearing, you know? I’m so involved in every single thing I do. Also, I want to learn; I’m not scared of learning in front of an audience. That’s what I’d like people to take away—to see that I’m making something that’s honest, and see that I want to get better, and just to be able to grow with me on that journey.”

Tahliah D. Barnett, FKA twigs, Singer-Songwriter, Dancer

“Sometimes when I’m working on a film, and someone will ask me if I’m having fun. And I’m tempted to tell them the truth: No, absolutely not. Having no fun here at all. You know what’s going to be fun? When it’s done, and I’ve done a fuckin’ good job, and I know people are getting something out of that. I’ll have a lot of fun then. A ton of it.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Actor

“Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Author

“Because if you don’t know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes—they throw off like sparks. But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.”

Dorothy West, Author

“None of the pictures I take a risk in cost a lot, so it doesn’t take much for them to turn a profit. We don’t deal in big budgets. We know what we want and we shoot it and we don’t waste anything. I never understand these films that cost twenty, thirty million dollars when they could be made for half that. Maybe it’s because no one cares. We care.”

Clint Eastwood, Actor, Producer, Director

“The immersion online is always in some ways shadowed, if you will, by this constant reminder that we should be doing something else too; that our email is just a click away; that there is this almost incessant feeling of ‘Well, I should go faster,’ instead of ‘I should immerse myself.’”

Maryanne Wolf, Author, “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain”

“You always get the best work when you’re relaxed, and there’s good grace, and nobody loses their dignity.”

George Miller, Filmmaker of “Mad Max” franchise

“I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

Gary Snyder, Poet

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”

Novalis, Poet, Philosopher

“My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other's wonder, each other’s human plight.”

Eudora Welty, Author

“I always have a pad of paper and a pencil within reach, to catch on the wing this turn of phrase which strikes me as felicitous, that idea which I hope to be able to examine more closely in the light of day.”

Roger Martin du Gard, Author

“Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.”

Bill Buxton, Designer, Author, Researcher, Lecturer

“If something doesn’t creep into a drawing that you’re not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.”

Edward Gorey, Illustrator

“It’s important to give others a sense of hope, that it is possible, and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that’s unique for yourself.”

Amy Tan, Author

“Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme…they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.”

Philip Levine, Poet

“So creativity has a lot to do with the main idea. Inspiration is what comes when you are dealing with the idea. But inspiration won’t invite what’s not there to begin with.”

Bob Dylan, Singer-Songwriter

“If, after I read a poem, the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so, I’m sure it’s a good one—and the same goes for paintings.”

Elizabeth Bishop, Poet

“I feel like you can’t really be truthful as an artist and empathize with the human experience, unless you know your truth and you’re not living a lie. So I’m learning through it, and it’s making me a better person, and it’s making me a better artist, I think.”

Diane Guerrero, Actor

“I wake up with new dreams every day…more I can do to channel that into things that I love to create is healthier for me and probably for everybody around me.”

Dolly Parton, Singer-Songwriter, Actor, Philanthropist

“It’s strange because a lot of people are like, ‘You can’t change human nature—people are inherently negative.’ I don’t think that’s true. If you expect the best from people, they’ll step up.”

Zooey Deschanel, Singer-Songwriter

“The serious novelist’s job, or one of them, at least, is to stare down the hole and report back. They’re beacons at the darker corners of human nature, and our readership comes with an understanding that they won’t willingly extinguish the light.”

Daniel D’Addario, Culture Reporter for “TIME” magazine

“Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it’s right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of…recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it.”

William Gaddis, Author

“I was told many times that the musical was dead when I was doing ‘Chicago’, and I never really believe that a genre is dead—I really feel it’s sort of the actual execution of the pieces and the careful way in which you have to approach them. I mean, everyone thought the sword-and-sandal film was dead until ‘Gladiator’ arrived, you know—it happens a lot. So I believe in the genre of musicals on film. When they don’t work, they’re hard to watch because they’re awkward and people start to sing and it doesn’t feel right, and one of the goals in a film is to make sure that the singing is earned. That by the time they get to singing, they have no other choice but to sing, and when it works, there’s nothing like it.”

Rob Marshall, Theater and Film Director

“Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”

George Santayana, Philosopher