Design Feast Series: Quotes

“It is the fate of modern life that we repeatedly lose touch with nature, the environment, the planet. But we try to regain it again and again. It’s like a circle. In children’s hearts and souls when they’re born into the world, nature already exists deep inside them. So what I want to do in my work is tap into their souls.”

Hayao Miyazaki, Animated Filmmaker

“I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology [course in college], it is not just the great works of [hu]mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.”

Laurie Colwin, Author

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”

Arundhati Roy, Author

“People pretend to be nice, people pretend to be smooth, and polite and everything, but this is only an appearance, because the way we’re built as human beings is only in paradox and contradictions.”

Vincent Cassel, Actor

“When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.”

André Gide, Author

“Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you’ll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved.”

Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter, Film Director

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.”

Doris Lessing, Author

“Writing is mysterious, and it’s supposed to be…any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we’re most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins. ”

Andrea Barrett, Author

“Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.”

J. G. Ballard, Author

“I would like to be remembered as someone who accomplished useful deeds, and who was a kind and loving person. I would like to leave the memory of a human being with a correct attitude and who did her best to help others.”

Grace Kelly, Actor

“Writing is being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it, like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm, white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will reform, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”

Mary Gaitskill, Author

“I find it frustrating that if you’re female, whatever your work; people are going to ask how it relates to your female-ness. Every woman artist everywhere is always being talked about in the context of being a woman, whereas male artists are just talked about in the context of their work. That imbalance gets exhausting.

Then again, yeah, I want to make work about being a woman, and I think I’m probably mainly making work that will appeal to girls and women, and their experiences. I don’t mean to deny that being female influences my work. I think there’s a lot of darkness, a lot of struggle, a lot of pressure and weird shit that goes on with being a girl. I don’t ever want to draw blandly happy, sexy women. I want to draw tough women, sad women, violent women, vulnerable women, righteously joyful women. It is what it is.”

Kaye Blegvad, General Maker-of-Things

“We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.”

Neil Gaiman, Author

“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don’t think is a good ride.”

Darren Aronofsky, Film Director

“In the evolution of knowledge—mistaken and unnecessary beliefs are forced out and supplanted by truer and more necessary knowledge. So too in the evolution of feelings, which takes place by means of art. Lower feelings—less kind and less needed for the good of humanity—are forced out and replaced by kinder feelings which better serve us individually and collectively. This is the purpose of art.”

Leo Tolstoy, Author

“Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”

Jonas Salk, Medical Researcher, Virologist

“I don’t care about my personal acting career any more. I’m done with it. After 10 years of making movies and going better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had? Am I just going to keep making movie after movie and be concerned with all of that ‘Are you up, are you down, are you hot, are you not?’, and I don’t really care. What I care about is working with people, what I care about is the remarkable experience of being able to be a part of bringing people together.”

Kevin Spacey, Actor

“If you can make the project that you are working on in the theater into something strong and good, where everyone is abe to be his- or herself all the time, freely and honestly, then you live a great life. And that’s the life I’ve had.”

Marian Seldes, Actor

“All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It’s like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.”

Truman Capote, Author

“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that’s heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.”

George R. R. Martin, Author of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” adapted into TV series “Game of Thrones”

“Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be a bridge or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or a simple garden you tend.”

Ken Burns, Documentary Film Director and Producer

“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.”

Raymond Chandler, Author

“The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.”

Edward Hopper, Painter

“I’m trying to find what makes me tick, and I think I have. It’s not all good news, but I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve made it all work.”

Elaine Stritch, Actor

“I don’t want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically…I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.”

Ingmar Bergman, Filmmaker

“The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.”

Alice McDermott, Author

“The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.”

Josephine Johnson, Author

“…be patient. Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing. It is. If you can relax into time, not fight it, not fret at its passing, you will become better. You probably won’t be very good at the beginning, but you will become better, and eventually you may actually become good. But it doesn’t help to be afraid of time, or to measure yourself against prodigies like Conrad or Crane or Rimbaud. There’s always going to be somebody who did it better than you, faster than you, and you don’t want to make comparisons that will discourage you in your work. In fact, most fiction writers tend to graybeard their way into their best work.”

Tobias Wolff, Author

“Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.”

Richard Powers, Author

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

Joyce Carol Oates, Author

“The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we’re reading, we’re thinking. It’s a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we’re looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there’s not as much reflective time. And it’s the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.”

Joyce Carol Oates, Author

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

Umberto Eco, Author

“Writers, ever since writing, began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word—life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls ‘the fleas of life’—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then.”

William Styron, Author

“When I was young, I came home one day and I said, ‘Dad, I was told men don’t cry.’ He looked at me and he said, ‘Son, that’s a lie. If you don’t cry, you don’t get rid of that poison that’s in your body, that hurt, that pain. That’s the only way you can truly be strong.”

Thompson Williams, World War II Veteran

“I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.”

Thomas Mann, Author

“The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.”

Thomas Mann, Author

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

Rachel Carson, Biologist, Conservationist, Author

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”

Nora Ephron, Filmmaker and Author

“I have learned that in the open-source world, you are not your code. A critique of your project is not tantamount to a personal attack. An alternative take on the problem your software solves is not hostile or divisive. It is simply the result of a regenerative process, driven by an unending desire to improve the status quo.”

Sam Stephenson, Software Developer

“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Studs Terkel, Author and Historian

“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”

Adrienne Rich, Poet and Educator

“I’m not sure what ‘coming out right’ means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.”

Jasper Johns, Artist

“…true on every record we’ve ever made: Our roots are always there, but we’re different people. Every year goes by and we have new experiences, we hear new things, we encounter new things and it influences our music. We’ve never been the kind of band that wanted to make the same record over again.”

Dan Auerbach, Singer and Songwriter of The Black Keys

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”

Martha Nussbaum, Philosopher, Educator, Author

“The effort to understand the Universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

Steven Weinberg, Physicist

“There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”

Annie Dillard, Author

“It’s not black or white; it’s classless, sexless. It doesn’t matter where you fall on any kind of spectrum: emotional truth is emotional truth. And this is the standard I’m trying to reach for. People are different and aesthetics are different—there’s so much variety in literature. But the universal needs the singular, and the singular must contain the universal. If you can put yourself in it, the labels fall away and it becomes art.”

Joe Fassler, Author

“My personal definition of science literacy is: How much do you still wonder about the world around you? What is your state of curiosity? When you pass something that you don’t know or understand, do you pause and reflect on what the answer might be? To me, that is the essence of science literacy. All children do this.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist

“I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.”

Terry Pratchett, Author

“I think the hardest thing to do in the world, show-business-wise, is write comedy. We had a great staff of writers, and if we had a sketch we were rehearsing and it wasn't working, we’d call the writers down and show them what we had come up with. And there were no egos. In 11 years, we never had a writer get angry because we made it a little bit more of our own and maybe a little improved. They would jump in and say, ‘Oh okay, how about this then, while you’re doing that?’ We were all in the sandbox together.”

Carol Burnett, Actress, Comedian, Singer, Writer