Milton Glaser Quotations

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.

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

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

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.

I do virtually nothing except my work. No hobbies.

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

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.

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.

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

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.

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.

His work had a kind of velocity in the way things were made,

In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.

The next time you see a 16-color, blind-embossed, gold-stamped, die-cut, elaborately folded and bound job, printed on handmade paper, see if it isn't a mediocre idea trying to pass for something else.

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.

Less isn't more; just enough is more.

Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public, not designers or clients. 'Do no harm' is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

The idea of trying able to explain why you do what you do is absurd.

Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.