Michael Graves Quotes

I think it's really important to design things with a kind of personality.

Most industrial designers do a bottle or a pen or a computer - things that go right past your eye. When you see a chair, it's almost like a person. It's this great big thing in front of you. It hits you more.

I am not an early-morning person; I don't like to get out of bed, and so I don't begin writing at five A.M., though some people, I hear, do. I write once my day has started. And I can work late into the night, also.

It's hard to act in the morning. The muse isn't even awake.

Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 I write. The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or I do other things. But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to writing.

I'm singing 'English Tea' from my new album 'Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.' I have a cup of tea in the morning, so it's something good to wake up to.

Before you went to work this morning in the city, did you spend some time with your family? Did you kiss your wife and tell her that she's pretty?

I confess, right at the start, to the doubts - and sometimes outright dreads - that go with me as I climb the stairs to my study in the morning, coffee mug in hand: I have to admit to the habitual apprehension mixed with a sort of reverence, as I light the incense . . . and wonder: what is going to happen today? Will anything happen? Will the angel come today?

The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

If it's possible, I will have some noodles in the morning and start talking to people, start to think about a few things in my head - the project or a few ideas which are not finished or if there are possible directions and what will lead into another game. It's always like setting up some kind of game you can continuously play.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

The thing about running is, if I run in the morning before work, I feel like I'm ahead of the day. Whatever work I've done in terms of preparation or research or thinking about the scene or the character, it all kind of crystallizes in that moment in the morning. And sometimes I have the best ideas then.

I write much better in the nonconfines of the early morning than I do the clutter of the day.

Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.

Good products are built by people who want to use it themselves

I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.

At 10 o'clock in the morning I'd go right in the studio. It feels good to be there in the morning before the day starts to mess with you - I don't mean in a negative way, but before I'd speak to a lot of people or get into anything, I'd go in there and just see what I felt. A lot happens in the morning for me in the studio.

Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.

After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves. The most productive ones get started early in the morning, when the world is quiet, the phones aren't ringing, and their minds are rested, alert, and not yet polluted by other people's words.

I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music.

I don't go to an office, so I write at home. I like to write in the morning, if possible; that's when my mind is freshest. I might write for a couple of hours, and then I head out to have lunch and read the paper. Then I write for a little bit longer if I can, then probably go to the library or make some phone calls. Every day is a little bit different. I'm not highly routinized, so I spend a lot of time wandering around New York City with my laptop in my bag, wondering where I'm going to end up next. It's a fairly idyllic life for someone who likes writing.

Dad has brought me a cup of tea in bed this morning! I said, 'Vati, why are you waking me up in the middle of the night? Are you on fire?

Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds.

I'm also lonely. I'll admit it. I go to Twitter because I'm lonely. I get my coffee in the morning, and I live alone. I get on Twitter, and I sit and have my coffee. Sometimes I'll look at it for 30 minutes. I will waste a lot of time on Twitter. I do! But it's my guilty pleasure. And I'll look for some happy stories to retweet, and I'll say some uplifting things to people. I try not to get caught into - I used to get tangled up into some crazy stuff. But I try not to do that anymore.

Products were once designed for the functions they performed. But when all companies can make products that perform their functions equally well, the distinctive advantage goes to those who provide pleasure and enjoyment while maintaining the power. If functions are equated with cognition, pleasure is equated with emotion; today we want products that appeal to both cognition and emotion.