I don’t know the difference between working and not working.

If I hadn’t been a designer, I’d have been a painter. I began as a painter and learned the craft of pottery in order to support myself.

My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people – writers, scientists, artists.

I don’t call myself an ‘industrial designer,’ because I’m other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

I don’t like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.

When you have clay in your hands, it’s hard to avoid making birds.

My work is very bodily. It’s not a shell, but a body.

If you want to be creative, don’t try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what’s been done before, and that’s a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They’re the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas...

The pleasure of making things beautiful or useful involves your feelings as well as your thinking. When your original sketch evolves into a tangible, three-dimensional object, your heart is anxiously following the process of your work. And the love involved in making it is conveyed to those for whom you made it.

To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.