“Once a job transcends into craft and from there into art, a door opens. Our craft becomes a canvas for something new and exciting. It never leaves, never fades into the background, but becomes the strong scaffold upon which new things are built.”
“I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that “it’s all about the process,” I see that as a bad sign. The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.”
“So what I finally decided was, art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being—literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you’re experiencing that piece of art, you’re not alone. You’re connected to the arts. So I feel like that can’t be too bad.”
“Perhaps because California has no past—no past, at least, that it is willing to remember—it has always been particularly adept at trailblazing the future. We live in the future launched there.”
“Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything - it might come in handy later.”
“Solving problems is the lowest form of design. Because design wants more from us. It wants our humanity. It wants our optimism. It wants our honesty. It wants our ideas for what a better world looks like. Some days, those are small ideas. Some days, those are big ideas.”
“When someone creates something and puts it in front of you, that thing came from inside of them, and if you make them feel bad, it’s going to be hard to fix, because you’ve actually crushed them.”
“Because a true sense of purpose is deeply emotional, it serves as a compass to guide us to act in a way completely consistent with our values and beliefs. Purpose does not need to involve calculations or numbers. Purpose is about the quality of life. Purpose is human, not economic.”
“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.”
“If you spend your life doing what you love, the speed at which the world goes on and changes around you is irrelevant.”
“The first thing to understand about poetry is that it comes to you from outside you, in books or in words, but that for it to live, something from within you must come to it and meet it and complete it. Your response with your own mind and body and memory and emotions gives a poem its ability to work its magic; if you give to it, it will give to you, and give plenty.”
“Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life … [They] have the ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, and to convert them into objects and ideas that people can actually understand and use.”
“If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be…I always thought there was enough of everything to go around—that there are enough ideas in the universe and enough nourishment.”
“I truly believe that people are looking for stories that really mean something—stories that are redemptive, inspiring, and bigger than an individual.”
“I’ll watch a genius do anything. I’ll watch my friend Andy use Photoshop to erase color impurities on the same image for an hour because he sees things I don’t see. I’ll watch him until I see that he sees them. It’s like opening a gift. Or the original meaning of ‘apocalypse’: the lifting of the veil.”
