Dave Thomas Quotes

Books are the heart of any home, and I spend hours going through books for design inspiration.

I don't know if you know it, J.B., but you're the sort of fellow who causes hundreds to fall under suspicion when he's found stabbed in his library with a paper-knife of Oriental design.

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.

Books have always been to me like a kind of embalmed mind. The dead may be scattered, and who can find them, but their voices live in the library.

I think as designers we realize design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence.

Style is based on limitations.

My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another.

Everything. A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library. Others believe that the world can be decoded by reading a newspaper. In my case, the only thing that made sense of the world was you, and without you the world will seem as garbled and tragic as a malfunctioning typewrit9.

A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

Nothing under the sun is accidental, least of all that of which the intention is so clearly evident.

All disputation makes the mind deaf; and when people are deaf, I am dumb.

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

It's like an Alcatraz around my neck

Designing for me is a very complex process. There are many ideas that I want to express in one object, very often contradictory. The creative process in Miu Miu is completely different from that of Prada. Miu Miu is not as complicated and thought out as Prada. Rather than being young, Miu Miu is immediate Prada is very sophisticated and considered; Miu Miu is much more naive. The solution, when I am working on Miu Miu, has to come immediately, instinctively, spontaneously with whatever is available at the moment. If I think three times, I stop.

I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.

It is imperative to create luxury products that are also functional. My vision for fashion precludes frivolous, fantasy-only designs. That said, fashion does tend to move more quickly than interior design. One doesn't change their couch every season as one does their wardrobe.

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

We know that no one person can succeed unless everybody else succeeds.

Love was more than blind. It was deaf and dumb, too. It was catatonic. It was vegetative.

You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite.

Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.

Design is a career where you learn creative decision making.