“Everyone complains that it has all been done before, but we haven’t even begun. There’s an incredible amount of new tricks up good people’s sleeves.”

Tibor Kalman

more info

“I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, ‘Where did it all go? Where are they now?’ It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.”

Michael Bierut

more info

“The best research gets your fingers dusty and your shoes dirty, especially because a novel is made of details. I had to translate places through my senses into the senses of my readers. I had to know what a place smelled like, what it sounded like when it rained in Mexico City. There’s no substitute for that. I’ve been steeped in evidence-based truth.”

Barbara Kingsolver

more info

Q: Do you have words to live by?
A: Jim Jarmusch once told me “Fast, Cheap, and Good…pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it won’t be good. If it’s cheap and good it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good it won’t be cheap.” Fast, cheap, and good…pick (2) words to live by.

Tom Waits

more info

It’s good having friends who farm. It’s good to know the names of their cows and the calves that come in the spring. It’s fun to see the new ones when I head up to get eggs from my neighbor. It’s good knowing they would be here in a minute for us anytime day or night, and it’s good knowing they can count on us the same way. We have a 1958 Ford tractor that I love. We have silos and a barn that has been here 100 years. The original house burned down years before we got here. Our house is a little tract house—nothing much at all. But we put on a tin roof and a covered porch and built a masonry bread oven. We have a big garden—man, I’m starting to cry here. It’s not the prettiest farm at all, but it’s the best place I’ve ever lived in my life.

Lynda Barry

more info

“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”

Lynda Barry

more info

“I think van Gogh was one of the great, great draftsmen. I love the little sketches in his letters, which seem like drawings of drawings. They are condensed versions of the big pictures he was painting at the time, so that Theo and the other people he was writing to could understand what he was doing. These days he’d be sending them on his iPhone. When you look at them, they contain everything. It’s all there. He certainly didn’t do anything by halves.”

David Hockney

more info

“A word can be any size.”

Ed Ruscha

more info

“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.”

Kenneth Goldsmith

more info

“I feel, sometimes, like I have a map in my pocket that folds up, and I pull it out, and it’s bigger than the table, and there’s a thousand places to go with her.”

Tom Waits

more info

“Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?”

Jack Gilbert

more info

“I’ve always been an interior sort. That is, I’m used to looking at the world as a somewhat misinformed observer—curious but unsure, preferring to look through a window rather than walk through a door. That has given me a lot of time to think about how the world gets stitched together, and to examine and poke at the structures beneath the spectacle.”

Martin Venezky

more info

“If there were libraries for musical instruments and for furniture, that would be great. Just to have something for a while, and then be able to let it go again.”

Will Oldham

more info

“I realized that all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.”

Grant Wood

more info

“I’d like somebody to write a book that really told the truth about life now. Leo Tolstoy but with drive-through windows.”

Nicholson Baker

more info