Philippe Starck Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

This museum is like a ghost train—at every stage you find a surprise. Intuition prepares you for enlightenment, not audio-visual lectures. There's less to read, more to fee.

Philippe Starck
A toothbrush is 28 grams of matter, 28 francs to buy and it's made to get rid of scraps of meat from between the teeth. Every gram of matter must provide its service as best it can. My trade is to be a producer of fertile surprises, an opener of doors in people's head.

Philippe Starck
I am just a copier, an impostor. I wait, I read magazines. After a while my brains send me a product... I am my brain's publisher.

Philippe Starck
It is important to inject love into the place where you live. It is not healthy to rent an interior designer to create a home for you because it is not good to live in another person's fantasy. People should select for themselves and stamp their own identity on a place. They should mix and match everything to make their own cocktail.

Philippe Starck
In perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism.

Philippe Starck
I try to rediscover why that object exists at all, and why one should take the trouble to reconsider It. I don't consider the technical or commercial parameters so much as the desire for a dream that humans have attempted to project onto an object.

Philippe Starck
Everything I do is a symbol. Everything, has a meaning.

Philippe Starck
I have refused everybody, including A-list celebrities.

Philippe Starck
Today, the problem is not to produce more so you can sell more. The fundamental question is that of the product's right to exist. And it is the designer's right and duty, in the first place, to question the legitimacy of the product, and that is how he too comes to exist. Depending on what answer he comes up with, one of the most positive things a designer can do is refuse to do anything,

Philippe Starck
I manage by absence. I go to the office two, three days a month, and those are the worst days for me. So the people on my team do what they want, when they want, but the results have to be perfect, crystal perfect. I cannot accept laziness or something that is not intelligent or any type of delay. If we say we will deliver a project on the 20th at 5 PM, on the 20th at 5 PM we shall blow the minds of the people we're presenting to.

Philippe Starck
I think if I directly design their apartment, I will not help them... If you are rich and famous and you buy an apartment (house) and you don't know what to do, you will rent an interior designer. But in the end you will not make your own home. You will take the prefab life made by your interior designer and that is stupid. With ICON you will do it yourself.

Philippe Starck
I outlawed the word 'user' in all company meetings, and insisted it be replaced by the words 'my friend', 'my wife', 'my daughter', 'my mother' or 'myself'. It doesn't sound the same at all, if you say: 'It doesn't matter, it's shit, but the user will make do with it', or if you start over and say; 'It's shit, but it doesn't matter, my daughter will make do with it.' All of a sudden, you can't get away with it anymore. All of a sudden, you can't get away with it anymore. There is an enormous task to be done with this kind of symbolic repositioning.

Philippe Starck
You must have your own responsibility, your own consciousness.

Philippe Starck
My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision. poetry, surrealism and magic [to design]. We have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept'.

Philippe Starck
I'm trying to move towards making objects which are honest, objects for non-consumers, for "modern rebels". Look, there are already millions of excellent chairs which are very comfortable, lamps which provide light, and so on. Is it necessary to create any more? The only question is: what will it bring to the human being who is going to use it? The urgent thing today is not to create a car or a chair which is more beautiful than another; what is urgent is for us all to fight with every means at our disposal against the fact that something is becoming extinct: love.

Philippe Starck
The world wants water not taps, the world wants warmth not a heater.

Philippe Starck
[At Thomson] the other important thing I did was that I outlawed the word "consumer" in all company meetings, and insisted it be replaced by the words "my friend", "my wife", "my daughter", "my mother", or "myself." It doesn't sound the same at all, if you say: "It doesn't matter, it's shit, but the consumers will make do with it," or if you start over again and say: "It's shit, but it doesn't matter, my daughter will make do with it. All of a sudden, you can't get away with it anymore. There is an enormous task to be done with this kind of symbolic repositioning.

Philippe Starck
Nobody is obliged to be genious but everybody is obliged to participate.

Philippe Starck