Design Feast Series: Quotes

“The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”

Willem de Kooning, Artist

“Once you catch the idea for an extended narration—drama or novel–and if that idea is firmly within you, then the writing brings you perhaps not so much pleasure as a deep absorption. …You see, my wastepaper basket is filled with works that went a quarter through and which turned out to be among those things that failed to engross the whole of me. And then, for a while, there’s a very agonizing period of time in which I try to explore whether the work I’ve rejected cannot be reoriented in such a way as to absorb me. The decision to abandon it is hard.”

Thornton Wilder, Playwright

“My main work is to grow and expand, and to investigate what else I’m made of besides being a musician. We all manifest ourselves in a lot of different ways. But most of us define ourselves by that one single thing that we’re probably best known for. And my belief is that we shortchange ourselves in that way, whereas if we define ourselves as a human being first, it includes that and every other aspect of what we are. So when you talk about ‘doing the work’, that’s the work I’m interested in. What can I contribute as a human being?”

Herbie Hancock, Pianist and Composer

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

Barbara Kingsolver, Author

“I’ve always believed a book functions best when it leaves a person more capable of living in the world. As readers, we experience a palpable, realistic verisimilitude. In the act of identifying with characters, we suspend belief in the material world and adopt the world of the narration. By calling attention to that artifice, and allowing the reader simultaneously to feel that world as a believable, palpable world, and also as a made thing, the book becomes more powerful.”

Richard Powers, Author

“[Being labeled eccentric] can be said in a way that kind of marginalizes creativity or art. I’ve always felt, when it’s too easy, that I want to pull it apart and ask, ‘What’s underneath this layer?’ I think we should celebrate those things.”

Beck, Singer-Songwriter

“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

Gloria Steinem, Feminist and Author

“Living in that childish wonder is a most beautiful feeling—I can so well remember it. There was always something more—behind and beyond everything—to me, the golden spectacles were very, very big.”

Kate Greenaway, Children’s Book Illustrator and Author

“Creative people thrive on serendipity, spontaneous interactions, moments of ribald humor, intense debate or just simple eye contact, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I decided that it was time to act. So I tried an experiment. I just stopped saying yes and started saying no to things.

Actually, there was a bit more method to my madness. I started a ritual that I still use today: I sit down and look at my calendar every Sunday night, pore through my coming week’s meetings and cancel a bunch of them—redundant ones where I don’t need to be ‘in the loop,’ ones where there is an opportunity for someone else to make a decision, ones that don’t particularly inspire me, or ones where I can’t really add value. My overarching goal right now, wherever possible, is to give myself more time to simply be.”

Paul Bennett, Chief Creative Officer at IDEO

“Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Toni Morrison, Novelist

“There’s a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It’s not just an exorcism.”

Art Spiegelman, Comics Artist and Advocate

“Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.”

Charles Lamb, Author

“People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.”

Adam Phillips, Psychologist

“Success is doing what makes you happy and doing good work and hopefully having a fruitful life. If I’ve felt like I’ve done good work, that makes me happy.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Actor

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”

Clarice Lispector, Author

“I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.”

Stendhal, Author

“Everybody on the sidewalk who’s currently 35 is going to be 45 and then 55 and 65. So reimagining the rest of their lives is not something that only the elite are entitled to play with. The reality is that for a generation or two, people have been living a lot longer, and we haven’t changed our mind-set about midlife. For many of us, the number of years we go on living will exceed the number of years in a conventional work life. What are we going to do?”

Jane Pauley, Television Anchor and Journalist

“Creativity—for me, that is where the power is,
that is where the healing is.”

Alice Walker, Author

“Geometry can produce legible letters but art alone makes them beautiful. Art begins where geometry ends, and imparts to letters a character transcending mere measurement.”

Paul Standard, Calligrapher and Author

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it’s no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”

Elizabeth Strout, Author

“The ideal way to get involved in this sort of work is to write in order to find out what you’re writing. You don't start with an outline and a plan, you start with these images that are very evocative to you.”

E. L. Doctorow, Author

“The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.”

Haruki Murakami, Author

“Between the mind that plans and the hands that build there must be a Mediator, and this must be the heart.”

Maria, Character in film “Metroplis” (1927)

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”

David Bowie, Singer-Songwriter

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining …researching …talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

E. L. Doctorow, Author

“Trust is an organic process, and it takes time. …I’m a big believer in longevity, and just sticking it out. If you manage to stick around, you kind of get successful.”

Jason Fried, Co-Founder and President of 37signals

“You must keep sending work out. You must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.”

Isaac Asimov, Author

“It’s an illusion that they keep selling you that you need to be in the music industry to make your music.

It’s an illusion to think that you need to run around Hollywood to put a film out. I’m living proof that, like, you can do whatever it is you want to do. Just believe it and just do it. That’s the thing—stop thinking about it and go do it.”

Pharrell Williams, Singer-Songwriter, Record Producer

“We need…personal projects that aren’t necessarily made for a bigger audience. I think it creates a creative block to always have the audience as a goal.”

Noomi Rapace, Actor

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

Zora Neale Hurston, Author

“Truth may be found in the heart of a philosopher but seldom in the figures of a statistician; it is far too delicate a thing to be pinned down to columns of numbers on ruled paper.”

Louis Bromfield, Author

“The Eskimos have all those words for snow, and it seems the only language we have for expressing success is numeric. It may be a universal language, but it’s an impoverished one. Maybe we need a word for ‘never having to sit in a meeting where someone reads long [PowerPoint] slides out loud.’ Maybe we should have an expression that captures the level of success you’ve achieved when you do exactly what you love every day.”

Jim Sollisch, Author

“To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.”

Paul Klee, Artist and Teacher at the Bauhaus

“I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.”

Jane Austen, Author

“Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.”

Emma Thompson, Actor

“I get very worried about this idea of art. Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. …If somebody wants to come along and say, ‘Oh, it’s art,’ that’s as may be. I don’t really mind that much. But I think that’s for other people to decide after the fact. It isn’t what you should be aiming to do. There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‘Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.’ …I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art, but merely practicing a craft, and working as good crafts[people]. …I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it’s art while it’s being created.”

Douglas Adams, Author

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”

Willa Cather, Author

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire.”

Willa Cather, Author

“On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.”

Evelyn Underhill, Author

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Joan Didion, Author

“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

“I think a mural can change a neighborhood in many ways. Because it begins to make people aware of what the beauty is that surrounds them.”

Richard Haas, Artist

“As an audience, I like fantasy movies, I like musicals, I like variety shows, I like Tony Bennett—it’s all the same to me. The fact that some things are more popular than others doesn’t make them better, and it certainly doesn’t make them worse.”

Ian McKellen, Actor

“I endeavor to make the composition tell a story.”

William Michael Harnett, Artist

“Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety. It shows itself in acts rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations.”

Louisa May Alcott, Author

“Writers are always edging towards the nightmarish to live with, don’t you think? We’re off in a corner doing our weird stuff. I can’t remember where it comes from but the best definition of writing a novel I’ve ever heard is jumping off a cliff and having to invent the rope on the way down.

But it’s godawful hard work getting a good book together and even if you do it, it doesn’t guarantee anything. And it’s getting really hard now, all the time, for new writers to break out. If you’ve got any vague hint of originality about you at all, then you’re going to struggle at first. I was lucky that a small Dublin press, Stinging Fly, wanted to publish my first book, and that from there the reviews were good and I was able to keep going. I think the only workable definition of success for a writer is if you can keep going.

I think you’ve ideally got to limit your focus to your desk, and the peripheries of your desk, and not think too much about anything else beyond that—the wider context, what people will think. If you do that and get a bit of luck, everything will work out. Of course it’s hard to shut out the ambition. Every writer and artist has ambition in them. You want to be widely read. Many say they don’t but they’re lying. If you genuinely don’t have any ambition as a writer, then write the pages and go throw them off the side of a fucking cliff.”

Kevin Barry, Author

“There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.”

Bruce Lee, Martial Artist

“The heart of [working in opera, tapestry, sculpture, puppetry, animation, film] is drawing, starting where you don’t know quite what you’re doing and discovering what the drawing will be, rather than knowing the script in advance and following it.”

William Kentridge, Artist

“It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.”

Charles Darwin, Naturalist, Geologist, Author