It would’ve been a better essay if I’d explained how disillusioned and lost I felt at that moment in my life. But that’s not how we did it back then. We changed every first-person confession into a royal “we” (or a less royal “you”).
The essential thing about writing is not understanding, but the pleasure of reading.
I use a very poor alphabet to express ideas which are very complicated.
Write about the lessons now so familiar they can be recited in your sleep. Write about the insights not yet sighted, their silhouettes blurry like the edges of a distant shore. Write about the job, the joy and chaos of designing and building. Write at least once a week. Write to learn how to write, and write to understand, the process itself like a looking glass through which you may yet discover a strange new world. Write so something meaningful can be said to others. Write to be accountable, write with honesty. Above all, write to preserve the scrap of an age, a voice; write so you won’t forget.
I have no plan to stop making dick jokes or to swear off ragging people who clearly have it coming to them. It’s just that it’s important to me to make world-class dick jokes and to rag the worthy in a way that no one is expecting. I want to become an evangelist for hard work and editing, and I want to get to a place where it shows in everything that I do, make, and share. Yes, even if it makes me sound like a fancy guy who just doesn’t get it.
It reminds me that story is the atomic unit of magic. […] It proves to me that life is about noticing and deeming the mundane as special, and that if you do that, just maybe you can wring the last bits of beauty out of this life while you’re here.
But just because you can’t have opinions about all things doesn’t mean you can’t have opinions about any things. There are some things we know for sure. These might be minor—how to treat your parents, how to grow tomatoes, how to build a house. We each have a few such things. Start there with your feet firmly planted and see how it feels. Then take a few small steps until you reach a place that still feels firm, but where nobody else is standing. Then try to make something beautiful with what you see.
Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I think one of the best things you can do for an artist is to trust them. Especially when they change.
We come to other people’s creative work out of a secret desire and hope that someone understands us better than we understand ourselves. We come to Austen and Kubrick and Basquiat and Aretha under the hopes that they have the same acute feelings, but more able hands and voices that can some how capture that fleeting emotion and crystalize it. We quote, because someone said it better than we can.
I don’t think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. “I can’t say it that way, what way can I find that will do?” One didn’t really bother about the existing modes.
As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.
He was a marvelous critic because he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to do.
Communication must be instant and it must be exact.
It depends on the person looking, because each of us sees only what he knows.
Your heart goes tick tock. Listen to it. Put your hand on it and feel it. Count the beats: one, two, three, four….When you have counted sixty beats a minute will have passed. After sixty minutes an hour will have passed. In one hour a plant grows a hundredth of an inch. In twelve hours the sun rises and sets. Twenty-four hours make one whole day and one whole night. After this the clock is no good to us any more. We must look at the calendar: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday make one week. Four weeks make one month: January. After January come February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. Now twelve months have passed, and your heart is still going tick tock. A whole year of seconds and minutes have passed. In a year we have spring, summer, autumn and winter. Time never stops: the clocks show us the hours, calendars show us the days, and time goes on and on and eats up everything. It makes even iron fall to dust and it draws the lines on old people’s faces. After a hundred years, in a second, one man dies and another is born.
A leaf is beautiful not because it is stylish but because it is natural, created in its exact form by its exact function. A designer tries to make an object as naturally as a tree puts forth a leaf.
I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.
My library is an archive of longings.
Draw a monster. Now tell me: why is it a monster?
We’re attracted to the painting [Nighthawks] because it is not finished. All of the paint has been applied, but there’s a gap that frustrates the viewer from deducing what is happening in the picture. […] The painting is lacking; it requires us to contribute something of ourselves in order to fill the void and finish it.
I have fond memories, from when I was young, of how my parents would sit at the kitchen table before serving dinner and talk to one another about their day. My sister and I weren’t terribly interested in the office politics at my mother’s job, but my father was always there, listening and nodding. Now that I’m older, I realize that the point of those chats was to give my mother an opportunity to tell a story so that my father could understand why she was a different person that night compared to when she left for work in the morning. She was describing the change in her over time, bridging the void between her and my father that developed throughout the day. There was distance between them, and her story closed the gap.
One human life, closely observed, is everyone’s life. In the particular is the universal.
Projects that seem cold or excessively composed are more indicative of a lack of understanding than a mark of professionalism. One can speak naturally and personally when they know someone well, and a friendly, affectionate, and hospitable tone is essential to cater to audiences, encourage dialogue with platforms, and produce the utility and resonance that great design seeks to achieve.