design
Only the Japanese would think of serving red watermelon in a green plate.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 20.
Disaster can be a fine designer. Better than a pencil sometimes. It can lead you to safety.
The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (New York: Viking, 2012), 111.
Those of you who’ve seen my book—whatever you may think of its contents—will probably agree that it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the e-book, it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping.
Acceptance speech for the Man Booker Prize, quoted by BBC News, “Man Booker Prize Won by Julian Barnes on Fourth Attempt,” by Tim Masters, October 19, 2011.
As a general matter we find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or saké cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary, we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina.
In Praise of Shadows (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 10.
I didn’t know what I could or couldn’t do and therefore thought I could do anything. In this sense, I was a person that did what I didn’t know I couldn’t do.
Matter in the Floating World, by Blaine Brownell (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 122.