Thomas Heatherwick Quotes

I can walk down the street and have a human experience every day.

Living life as normally as possible gives you a richer well of experiences to draw from.

I don't think the arts would have been as meaningful to me if I hadn't grown up in Harlem.

Our lives are largely made up of a series of mundane moments, but those little moments are often the finesse that shapes our entire existence; it's not necessarily the big, dramatic events, although they do, too, of course.

In daily or everyday life, I am so impressed with tiny details, like when I look up at a street lamp falling on the street, it seems to have meaning or so much information in it.

My family didn't really have newspapers at home or talk about politics - my family are not political. They were too busy getting on with it - working, looking after kids, trying to pay off the mortgage, all that stuff.

Neapolitan people are always outside. They are not in front of the television.

Many of our buildings have large format murals that are of varying subject matter, and we've found that those are the sort of things that make people stop, digest, and absorb.

There is a sense of civic connection to the city when you light up iconic buildings or sites.

Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.

We're not talking about an elite art form from the price point of view. We have a building in L.A. that is incredibly open, exciting, inviting, and all that, and there's no reason for this music not to be part of everybody's everyday life.

The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.

From my perspective, most of my life has been dealing with the day-to-day, kitchen-to-bedroom-to-living-room-to-garage life with people. Most people are just trying to figure out how to love the people in their world, to love their God and to deal with some of these questions about God.

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.

I think of art as a glue, a cultural and social glue. It's one of the means that has served to show us the things we believe in and the things we celebrate; it has served to reinforce our relationship to each other.

We need to define what culture is. Every human being lives within a culture, and culture means "To grow in." It means to literally fall, and this is exactly what I believe is happening all around us right now.

Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hanging around in candy stores and bars and drinking soda popon stoops, and have passed a judgment, the gist of which is: "This is deplorable! If these people had decent homes and a more private or bosky outdoor place, they wouldn't be on the street!" That judgment represents a profound misunderstanding of cities. It makes no more sense than to drop in at a testimonial banquet in a hotel and conclude that if these people had wives who could cook, they would give their parties at home.

The arts give us our identity as a community; they also draw new people, fresh visions, and renewable economic opportunity to our community.

There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.

A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.

It's in our own lives, every single day, whether we recognize it as funny at the moment or not.

People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They're no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor; life will only be something you can get through the mail.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we’re living in. All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.

In Germany, a certain artistic sense is fairly common, but the artist's sense is foreign there.