20th-century Designer Quotes

Mikhail Kalashnikov

H. R. Giger

Gianni Versace

Howard H. Aiken

Shigeru Miyamoto

Gary Gygax

Jonathan Ive

For me, elegance is not to pass unnoticed but to get to the very soul of what one is.

Christian Lacroix

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard H. Aiken

Appearance is everything. I find that a view is secondary. Even in those apartments on the East River, it's dull, looking out at those little boats.

In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game — 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.

All creative people hate mathematics. It's the most uncreative subject you can study.

I only included things that everybody likes, like violence, flowers, children, women, friendship and death.

Tomonobu Itagaki

The more I learnt about this cheeky – almost rebellious – company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had reason for being that wasn't just about making money.

No manufacturer, from General Motors to the Little Lulu Novelty Company, would think of putting a product on the market without benefit of a designer.

About 80 percent of our customers buy our shoes not to compete in, but to wear in their leisure time.

Ralf Metzenmacher

Games are a trigger for adults to again become primitive, primal, as a way of thinking and remembering. An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals, that's all. When I am a child, creating, I am not creating a game. I am in the game. The game is not for children, it is for me. It is for an adult who still has a character of a child.

Shigeru Miyamoto

Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.

It has to be well timed. It needs to have the right components that maybe contain emerging technologies or something like, say, when Doom came out — the Network play — there weren't many games like that. There was a really great 3D world that a lot of people hadn't seen. It was light-years ahead of Wolfenstein. It was shareware, so it had Internet distribution. We used the Internet to get it all over the place. So it used a lot of stuff that was just becoming popular at that time. id just capitalized on it.

In very other period of art history, the idea itself –the what – had been primary. Today the idea matters less than the way it is arrived at; it is the how that makes the work. This word brings us again face to face with the theme and its infinite variations. It is no longer a matter of knowing, of possessing the truth, but of approaching it... knowing that the road is long, knowing that the road does not end, knowing that the road is the end in itself.

If you want to make the best of yourself you don't necessarily need to diet — you need to wear the right stuff.

Mathematics is found to be the special, necessary lens through which nature must be observed since nature is defined as being exactly a structure of mathematical entities and relations.

Colors are ghosts, they only start to exist when light is perceived on the retina as a stimulus and is processed into color perception in our brain.

Gianni A. Sarcone

Throughout history, people have never before expected to be as comfortable as people do today.

I would have preferred to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example, a lawn-mower.

Mikhail Kalashnikov

Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making.

I like to dress egos. If you haven't got an ego today, you can forget it.

Death is very sophisticated. It's like a Noel Coward comedy. You light a cigarette and wait for it in the library.

Theadora Van Runkle

The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

The ardent golfer would play Mount Everest if somebody would put a flagstick on top.

The advantage of being female is that once you're past 65, you can be a dowager empress. After the difficult part in the middle, you're allowed to be eccentric.

I'd made a family friendly game about a beaver before this, but when I tried to put it online it got torn apart by a few prominent reviewers. People said that the main character looked like a scary animatronic animal. I was heartbroken and was ready to give up on game-making. Then one night something just snapped in me, and I thought to myself- I bet I can make something a lot scarier than that..