Design Feast Series: Quotes

“To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.”

Edward Weston, Photographer

“Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness.”

William Morris, Designer and Author

“The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.”

Billy Collins, Poet

“The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.”

Edward Albee, Playwright

“One day I will find the right words,
and they will be simple.”

Jack Kerouac, Author

“Having complete freedom is probably the worst way to start a project.”

Simon Collison, Web Designer

“‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.’ I’ve never liked this age-old adage because it polarizes a phenomenon too complex to be black and white. Really, it’s about how you treat the people you know and don’t know. It’s about being excited and confident about what you do know and honest about what you don’t know.”

Daniel Epstein, Founder of The Unreasonable Institute

“After ‘The Evil Hour’, I did not write anything for five years. I had an idea of what I always wanted to do, but there was something missing and I was not sure what it was until one day I discovered the right tone—the tone that I eventually used in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. It was based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. When I finally discovered the tone I had to use, I sat down for eighteen months and worked every day.”

Gabriel García Márquez, Author

“We’re dealing with a finicky product. We’re talking about fish, most of it wild. Every fish is different. Every customer is different. Every employee is different. And the idea is to be able to line up fish and customer and counterman perfectly hundreds of times a day.”

Mark Russ Federman, Retired Owner of Russ & Daughters

“Confidence as a writer should not be confused with personal, egotistical confidence. A writer is a vehicle. I feel the story I am writing existed before I existed; I’m just the slob who finds it, and rather clumsily tries to do it, and the characters, justice. I think of writing fiction as doing justice to the people in the story, and doing justice to ‘their’ story—it’s not ‘my’ story. It’s entirely ghostly work; I’m just the medium. As a writer, I do more listening than talking. W. H. Auden called the first act of writing ‘noticing.’ He meant the vision—not so much what we make up but what we ‘witness’. Oh, sure, writers “make up” the language, the voice, the transitions, all the clunking bridges that span the story’s parts—that stuff, it’s true, is invented. I am still old-fashioned enough to maintain that what happens in a novel is what distinguishes it, and what ‘happens’ is what we see. In that sense, we’re all just reporters. Didn’t Faulkner say something like it was necessary only to write about ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’ in order to write well? Well, I think that’s all we do: We find more than we create, we simply see and expose more than we fabulate and invent. At least I do. Of course, it’s necessary to make the atmosphere of a novel more real than real, as we say. Whatever its ‘place’ is, it’s got to feel, concretely, like a place with richer detail than any place we can actually remember. I think what a reader likes best is memories, the more vivid the better. That’s the role of atmosphere in fiction: it provides details that feel as good, or as terrifying, as memories. Vienna, in my books, is more Vienna than Vienna; St. Cloud’s is more Maine than Maine.”

John Irving, Author

“The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.”

Ralph Ellison, Author

“My work does not coagulate. It is as unmanageable as a raw egg on the kitchen floor. It makes me crazy. I am really going to try now and I’m afraid that the very force of the trying will take all the life out of the work. I don’t know where this pest came from but I know it is not new.

We work in our own darkness a great deal with little real knowledge of what we are doing. I think I know better what I am doing than most writers but it still isn’t much.”

John Steinbeck, Author

“A novel, basically, is writing one sentence—then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.”

Young-ha Kim, Author

“Meaning out in the world. It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people’s pain. I’m always conscious of that though I am less aware of it under certain circumstances—good friends at dinner, other books. Teaching makes a big difference, but that is not enough. Teaching could make me into someone who is complacent, unaware, rather than part of the solution. So what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing the disorder, you are sovereign at that point. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.”

Toni Morrison, Author

“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

“The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences.”

J. M. Coetzee, Author

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

Jules Verne, Author of “A Journey to the Center of the Earth”

“Design is everywhere. Good or bad. Intentional or accidental. Everything we use in our daily lives has a design. My perspective, like most, for a long time was a consumer of these designs with little attention paid to their creation. However, as I’ve started to dig deeper into design, my perspective has changed. I view everything, probably to a fault, in the context of its design and what decisions were made in its creation. …

Admittedly, I’m a n00bie in the design world. It is only recently that I’ve tried to change my perspective a bit to ‘see’ design. It is amazing how people travel the world to gain a fresh perspective on life. It amazes me even more though how your perspective can change over night on no special occasion. One day you see your toothbrush as a gift from the dentist and the next day it becomes a culmination of human creativity and design. I guess design is at its finest when you notice it the least.”

Brendan Hennessy, Web Developer

“I pay no attention whatever to anybody’s praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer and Musician

“Ah, good conversation—there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”

Edith Wharton, Author

“I don’t see the camaraderie [on Broadway] as much anymore. Everyone wants to be a soloist before really learning how to relate. When you can relate to the person next to you without words and be alive, when you can keep the energy and interest going, it is magical.”

Chita Rivera, Actor, Dancer, Singer

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.”

H. L. Mencken, Author and Critic

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”

E. L. Doctorow, Author

“No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.”

Helen Keller, Author, Activist, Lecturer

“The key to acting is to look ‘unwatched’. That’s what I look for as a film lover. I’m looking for ‘unwatchness’. It’s a trick, y’know. It’s so different from the energy of the theater, for example, where the whole point is [that] you’re in a room with however many hundreds of people, maybe 10, but the camera is there. It’s there! It’s looking at your every pore, and you have to remain open to it, remain relaxed to it, remain engaged with what you’re doing, remain spontaneous, remain open and free and up for it. And it’s very difficult, particularly when you are, as most of us are, shy and inclined to put up some carapace.”

Tilda Swinton, Actor

“Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.”

Louis Pasteur, Microbiologist and Chemist

“Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist [herself or] himself. In becoming an end, it defeats itself.”

Henry Miller, Author

“Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.”

Ralph Ellison, Author

“My face is very deep in the mud. I can’t see the trees or the woods or the valley or the hills. You can only follow what’s on your mind. In fact, a song is something you write because you can't sleep unless you write it.”

Joe Strummer, Singer-Songwriter and Guitarist of The Clash

“Art does not reproduce the visible;
rather, it makes visible.”

Paul Klee, Painter and Teacher at the Bauhaus

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops—at all…”

Emily Dickinson, Poet

“Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.”

David Byrne, Singer-Songwriter

“To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.”

Jean-Luc Godard, Film Director

“I’m giving thanks in two ways today, first for things that have lasted, persisted (and here’s hoping they keep on going), and second—for change; for our ability to create beauty in new ways. So I’m saying thank you for what's old and what's new.

Thanksgiving, I think, can go both ways.”

Robert Krulwich, Correspondent at National Public Radio

“There are two ways to knit experience, which is what writing is about. Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area. … It’s part of my feeling that what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that’s what writing is, I think that’s what painting is. It’s seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.”

Nadine Gordimer, Author

“Jerry and I were in sync, not wanting to find the beat of the week. We wanted to find something that was unique, find artists that had something to say in a unique way. We weren’t thinking of how much money we could make on each artist. We were just thinking about, ‘How can we put out great records? How can we put out records that we would buy ourselves?’”

Herb Alpert, Trumpeter and A&M Co-Founder

“The pleasure of making things beautiful or useful involves your feelings as well as your thinking. When your original sketch evolves into a tangible, three-dimensional object, your heart is anxiously following the process of your work. And the love involved in making it is conveyed to those for whom you made it.”

Eva Zeisel, Industrial Designer

“(1) Find a subject you care about. (2) Do not ramble, though. (3) Keep it simple. (4) Have the guts to cut. (5) Sound like yourself. (6) Say what you mean to say. (7) Pity the readers.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Author

“Take a blank canvas. In itself, by itself, it’s perfection, right? It has order. But one dot on it, you destroy the order. Now the search goes on. Where do you go? You put another dot, you got problems. So it’s that kind of dialog to resolve what’s coming out, and then try to form it into its being.”

Morris Barazani, Artist

“When designing a product, the question you should be constantly asking yourself is ‘what is the user trying to do here, and how does my interface help?’. In the case of Google Reader, I want to consume content I subscribe to—for the most part, that would be text. Suddenly, if having a great reading experience is a priority, everything changes. Line height and horizontal motion matters, background and text colors matter, white space matters. Every feature of the software and interface should be strained through the sieve of user goals.”

Fred Oliveira, Developer and Designer

“I don’t write books in order to explain my experiences of life; I write them to make things make sense…”

Richard Russo, Author

“People are always asking when I’m going to open another store. I’m not. The simpler I can keep the business, the better it is for me. I like my lifestyle, and I don’t want to make it more complicated than it is now. I’m not business oriented, I’m happiness oriented.”

Ron Green, Modern Furniture Collector and Owner of the Green Ant, Utah

“Any sort of blog we felt with even 100 readers or even less was worth our time. As media is more and more fractionalized, you can’t afford to not be any place. …It’s about a slow build and having that intricate and honest conversation with our fans and potential audience. Sometimes that takes months, years, to build.”

Jeremy Maciak, Head of Marketing at Vagrant Records

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well, they strengthen their souls. Storytellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, Author

“The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical.”

John Dewey, Philosopher

“Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.”

Henri Bergson, Philosopher

“I didn’t like music anymore. My connection to music had just become obligation and exhaustion. It had gotten too far away from where it started, which was basically me loving music so much that I had to write songs and I had to make recordings. I needed a big lifestyle change, and that required getting away from Modesto and just starting fresh, with an emphasis on getting a little healthier and living around mountains and being outdoors. …

I still laugh about the fact that this thing I do, which is writing songs and recording and spending lots of time in the studio ... goes completely against this other thing which I’m really passionate about: spending as much time as I can outside.”

Jason Lytle, Singer-Songwriter

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”

Thích Nhất Hạnh, Buddhist Monk, Author, Peace Activist

“I like making and continuing to nurture something. The thing that always threw me with client work was that I would propose a solution—sometimes based on experience or sometimes an educated guess—but it might not be the best solution. I made something, gave it to the client, and it became theirs—all the problems became theirs, too. Something about that felt disheartening to me and I often struggled with it. When you are your own client and are able to keep iterating, you can revise something based on the way it’s being used and the feedback you’re receiving. You can improve it and make it the best it can be for as many people as possible. There’s something really wonderful about that; that made me fall in love with design all over again.”

Jason Santa Maria, Designer, Author, Speaker

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.”

John Steinbeck, Author