Colleen Atwood Quotes

Like many people out there, I'm inspired by the level of attention to detail, design and execution of Apple products.

The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.

The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it.

My mom was one of the original designers for Coach in the eighties, and she designed some classics, including the City Bag. It's the only bag I use!

I've always had Paul Smith wallets for some reason.

It's not unusual for a luxury company to be born from a single product and then diversify. Louis Vuitton began with luggage, and Gucci with leather goods.

I appreciate good tailoring as much as good details of construction.

You look for the way something is built. You see a Prada bag and you look at the stitching at the back. If it's a fake one, then they make it really cheap. If it's a real Prada bag and I will look at it, I will count every single stitch and make sure they are exact distance apart.

For me, couture is like 35 mm. film. It's so important we school ourselves to see real quality. In a couture garment, as in a 35 mm. film, you really feel the life of the people who made it. In high-street fashion, it's different. There's no risk.

I was very pleased when PRS presented me with my SE Angelus acoustic, a beautiful guitar of stunning quality. It was in response to the challenge of building a guitar that shared the integrity and attention to detail that the Alex Lifeson Private Stock Angelus possesses in a package more broadly accessible. The SE Alex Lifeson Thinline is that model. Carefully selected materials, expert craftsmanship and a smart approach to concept resulted in a guitar that is beautiful to look at and rewarding to play.

We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. It’s tempting to think it’s because the people who use them don’t care - just like the people who make them. But what we’ve shown is that people do care. It’s not just about aesthetics. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well made. We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. our success is a victory for purity, integrity - for giving a damn.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.

With expensive fashion, the inside should be as perfect as the outside.

Ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of beauty.

With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

What we make testifies who we are. People can sense care and can sense carelessness.

My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.

Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can assume great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became “geniuses” (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

There's a feeling about it. You feel almost like a cabinetmaker, laying planks. There's a real feeling when you know you're getting it right. It's a physical feeling.

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

Learn to do the common things uncommonly well.

When I was a carpenter, I once worked with this Russian lady architect. I would tell her, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I want to change that a half inch,’ and she would say, ‘No limit for better.’ I think that is a worthy credo. You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.

The workmanship was better than the subject matter.

Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

You don’t try to build a wall, you don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there… You say ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ And you do that every single day and soon you have a wall.