Design Feast Series: Quotes

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”

Dale Carnegie, Author

“Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.”

André Gide, Author

“I read an article written by a young writer who had shown Philip Roth his book, and Roth had said, ‘Congratulations, and now quit because it’s a horrible profession, and all you you do is suffer.’ And my feeling was, there is only one proper answer, which is to extend your hand and say welcome and wish them all the luck in the world.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, Author

“A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower—the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower—lean forward to smell it—maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking—or give it to someone to please them. Still—in a way—nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time … So I said to myself—I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers: Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don’t.”

Georgia O'Keeffe, Artist

“Whether [she or he] is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”

Walker Evans, Photographer

“What the Designer Ought to Be: Let the designer be bold in all sure things, and fearful in dangerous things; let him avoid all faulty treatments and practices. He ought to be gracious to the client, considerate to his associates, cautious in his prognostications. Let him be modest, dignified, gentle, pitiful, and merciful; not covetous nor an extortionist of money; but rather let his reward be according to his work, to the means of the client, to the quality of the issue, and to his own dignity.”

Milton Glaser, Designer and Illustrator

“Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.”

Maria Popova, Founder and Editor of “Brain Pickings”

“The trick is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity,
self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.”

Wendy Wasserstein, Playwright

“I read an article written by a young writer who had shown Philip Roth his book, and Roth said, ‘Congratulations and now quit because it’s a horrible profession, and all you do is suffer.’ And my feeling was, there is only one proper answer, which is to extend your hand and say welcome and wish them all the luck in the world.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, Author

“What makes a poet is, surely, the love of these things, a desperate search for the tiny ray of sunshine which used to flicker on the floor of a child’s bedroom.”

François Mauriac, Author

“I used to play like a thousand notes a minute, you know. You don’t try to get too fancy. You try to get more feeling in your music. In other words, you gotta get your soul going. That’s what music’s all about.”

Gabe Baltazar, Jazz Musician

“We know perfectly well from the moment that we know anything about mortal existence, that it is mortal, in the sense that there’s no hope—you’re going to die. And yet, we go on, our hope is involved in what happens every day as we wake up and go through it and meet friends and talk and read poems and see the light come and go. Our hope is not a thing in the future; it’s a way of seeing the present.”

W. S. Merwin, Poet

“We all have our time machines, don’t we. Those that take us back are memories … And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”

H. G. Wells, Author

“Be patient and assured in your taste and good things will come.”

Drawn and Quarterly, Publisher

“To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in the darkness and grope toward an answer, to put up with the anxiety about whether there is an answer.”

Ray Dolby, Audio Engineer

“There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives.”

Michael Ondaatje, Author

“The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.”

Sol LeWitt, Artist

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots—places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

John Updike, Author

“I have three messages. One is we should never, ever give up. Two is you never are too old to chase your dreams. Three is it looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team.”

Diana Nyad, Endurance Swimmer

“In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.”

Twyla Tharp, Dancer and Choreographer

“Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids—all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through.”

Garrison Keillor, Author

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

G.K. Chesterton, Author

“Stanley Kubrick, Film Director: “The reality of the final moment, just before shooting, is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.””

Stanley Kubrick, Film Director

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one [hu]man’s life.”

T. S. Eliot, Poet

“To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.”

Giorgio de Chirico, Artist

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”

Frida Kahlo, Artist

“In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”

Flannery O’Connor, Author

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

Franz Kafka, Author

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Author and Aviator

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”

Gilda Radner, Comedian and Actor

“…I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote ‘Fahrenheit 451’, I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.”

Ray Bradbury, Author

“One of the few graces of getting old—and God knows there are few graces—is that if you’ve worked hard and kept your nose to the grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is the splendid grace. And I think that is what’s happening to me.”

Maurice Sendak, Children’s Book Illustrator and Author

“I’ve always really appreciated the fact that I can write a song about something that means a lot to me, and has to do with something in my own life, but I can meet someone on the street who, the same song has affected them in a different way or helped them through something in their life. That they were just able to listen to that song and relate to it completely, without knowing or having met me before—I think that’s the greatest part about music.”

Dallas Green, Singer-Songwriter of City and Colour

“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being ‘in’ the light, it’s being there ‘before it arrives.’ It enables me, in some sense.

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?”

Toni Morrison, Author

“Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box. Then 90 people are offering up solutions to the problems those pages create. You’re trying to make something very clear in this maelstrom of activity with all this anxiety about how much money is being spent. I don’t think you can ever make it the way you have it in your head.”

David Fincher, Film Director

“To shape and sharpen the logic of a story, to tighten the flow of events, ultimately to define the idea in its totality, is much like a game of chess. In the light of overall strategy, each move is the result of doubts, proposals, and rejections, which inevitably bring to mind the successes or failures of previous experiences.

Inspirational raptures may happen, but most books are shaped through hard, disciplined work. Creative work, to be sure, because its ingredients come from the sphere of the imaginary. But the manipulation of these ingredients requires much more than mere inclination or talent. It is an intricate process in which the idea slowly takes form, by trial and error, through detours and side roads, which, were it not for the guidance of professional rigor, would lead the author into an inextricable labyrinth of alternatives.

And so, to the question ‘How do you get your ideas?’ I am tempted to answer, unromantic though it may sound, ‘Hard work.’”

Leo Lionni, Children’s Book Author and Illustrator

“Metaphors impart concentrated narratives—which are meaningful, like perfume, when you know or like how they smell.”

John Maeda, President, Rhode Island School of Design

“As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; ‘it’s the aspect’.”

Orson Welles, Actor, Director, Writer, Producer

“…You are just hanging out, listening, feeling, having the place resonate a little bit. And then all of a sudden, ideas come naturally. I don’t know when and where. I think this is a very natural process. Everybody—all of you, all of us—we experience this. And what I discovered was that when I have these feelings, it is like being a boy again. All of a sudden, I think this is me when I was 10 years or 12 years old. I’m dreaming. I’m there and something comes to me, but it’s not, of course, naïve dreaming. Everything, which is part of my biography, is there. But it’s not there as a research product or as reference material. It went into me, as part of my life. Then it comes out from somewhere—from my emotions or whatever, my feelings.

So, I’m at the same place as at the time when I experienced architecture as a boy without knowing it. This is what I love. These beginnings, these moments of the beginning. And then comes the really hard task when I have to take care that nobody destroys my first image. Because, as you know, we’re doing a job as architects. We are surrounded by politics, by laws, by money, by clients who have weak moments, and all these things. Sometimes people want to take away or harm my image, my baby. So, this needs a little bit of persistence. Maybe that’s where my reputation comes from that I’m a stubborn guy, which I’m not, of course.

As I get older, I think I got some kind of a… I’m sort of secure that I can do this—be a boy, and in being a boy and dreaming, doing something. …”

Peter Zumthor, Architect

“I am always in the picture somewhere. The amount of space I use I am always in, I seem to move around in it. And there seems to be a time when I lose sight of what I wanted to do, and then I am out of it. If the picture has a countenance I keep it. If it hasn’t, I throw it away.”

Willem de Kooning, Artist

“…I can correct better if I see it in typescript. After that, I revise with scissors and pins. Pasting is too slow, and you can’t undo it, but with pins you can move things from anywhere to anywhere, and that’s what I really love doing—putting things in their best and proper place, revealing things at the time when they matter most.”

Eudora Welty, Author

“My one thought would be that we all love the story of the underdog. But specifically the underdog that is humble, and still remains humble even when the unlikely thing happens that s/he succeeds. Because more often than nought, the underdog’s role is to fail. Asian values are about humility—humility is a calming and welcome force in our chaotic world today, I believe.

Humility is always re-ingrained in me when I remember how I am the son of a mom-and-pop tofu maker from Seattle, and I worked along side them as a child. I learned what hard work is about—and it made me realize that no matter how high I might rise professionally, I will never be someone that could have worked as hard as my parents did at the tofu store. They taught me humility, just by being who they were and are.”

John Maeda, Designer, Author, Educator

“You see, I had an odd upbringing. My father was a scholar, a professor in the town where I was born, and his subject was folklore. He was a master at telling stories—folk tales and adventures. I was very shy as a boy, and heard more fairy tales than the average child because of my father. This and my shyness prompted my imagination, and led to an interest in make believe.”

Max von Sydow, Actor

“What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: curious and teachable.”

Roger Ebert, Film Critic and Author

“When I left for what I thought would be a year, I found that the restlessness dissipated. I wasn’t looking to travel around the world indefinitely. That’s never been an aim. However, the restlessness was replaced by an extraordinary curiosity for just about everything I saw. I wanted to build a life around that curiosity. All of the work I do—the consulting, the food writing, the blog—is to facilitate that, and to enable me to see and experience more of the little things in life. In acknowledging this shift away from restlessness and toward learning, I came a long way to accepting more of where I am today. I’m making choices only for me, which is not something everyone has available to them.”

Jodi Ettenberg, Blogger at “Legal Nomads” and Author

“I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.”

Vincent van Gogh, Artist

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”

Joseph Campbell, Mythologist

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

Flannery O’Connor, Author

“I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

Flannery O’Connor, Author

“Solving the problem of the book you’re writing always remains hard work, and your progress is snail-like. Even if you write a book in two years, sometimes you get a page a day, sometimes you get no pages … every sentence raises a problem, and essentially what you’re doing is connecting one sentence to the next. And you write a sentence and you have to figure out what comes next or what doesn’t come next.”

Philip Roth, Author