Milton Glaser

“I've been a printmaker and designed objects. I've done 500 posters.”

“We're very good in America at talking about stuff, often stuff to buy. We tend to talk about our iPods. We tend to talk about cars or new fads.”

“Color is so intuitive.”

“We are all born with genius. It's like our fairy godmother. But what happens in life is that we stop listening to our inner voices, and we no longer have access to this extraordinary ability to create poetry.”

“I do not want to say I'm a product designer. I've been trying all my life to not be categorized, to learn something and then to forget about it.”

“If we don't have a vigorous questioning, aggressive journalistic community and mythology, democracy itself is in great jeopardy.”

“I have been an art director, a book designer, a book-jacket designer and an interior designer.”

“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.”

“Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.”

“I do virtually nothing except my work. No hobbies.”

“If you can sustain your interest in what you’re doing, you’re an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people’s professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment — and that’s a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place. What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.”

“The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.”

“All the things you're not supposed to do at the beginning of your professional life - transgressiveness, arbitrariness and violating expectations - you find more attractive at the end of your professional life.”

“We’re always looking, but we never really see.”