Quotes from David Linley

I started off by doing everything myself, driving the truck, going to the woodshop, buying the wood, designing the furniture, cutting it out, making it myself, finishing it, polishing it, and delivering it, and writing the invoice and writing the letters, doing the books, doing the telephone bill and everything else like that.

I have always loved wood. Every piece is different. It gets better with age and it has a certain character all of its own.

Pepys was such a meticulous person that he had little wooden blocks to make all the books on his shelves the same height.

Ideally you should try to buy upholstered items that have retained their original fillings of horsehair, wool or down, because they provide a much more satisfying shape than when they have been replaced with foam rubber or other modern materials.

We had an immensely happy childhood.

Design is important. I spend much of my working life as a designer. But how can you design for materials if you don't know what they can do? The feel of them, the possibilities, the capabilities? These are things you learn only by working with materials all the time. Frankly, a university degree is not much help in that.

We are no longer teaching young people to make things that are beautiful and of very high quality. We are not giving them the chance to learn how to create artefacts to a high standard of design and workmanship.

The workshop to me always means great atmosphere, working, smell of wood, dust and, at the end of the day, you've created something.

When I left Parnham aged 18, I could easily have ended up twiddling my thumbs in a workshop all week. But I lucked out and found an agent who immediately got me work and before long there was enough demand for my furniture to start a shop.

I'm extremely proud of my relations and my heritage and my family. That's one side of my life, and my work is the other side of my life, and... I've always tried to keep them, you know apart.

If you cut me open, you would find bits of me looking at things with an aesthetic eye, also with a historical eye. But mostly at the way things have transported themselves through time.

Horse Guards is my favourite building in London.

I loved the idea of evolving traditional methods and design to make products that last but are also relevant for the modern age.

I love partridge and duck casseroles, and have been known to hunt my own game. It's important to eat off the land where possible.

In an ideal world, you would have his-and-hers bathrooms and his-and-hers dressing rooms, complete with a single bed where the Mrs. need not be woken up when there's a 7 o'clock flight to catch.

A lot of the design courses in schools and colleges don't incorporate very much making, and a lot of the making courses incorporate too much technology and computers.

There was a submarine that I desperately wanted to buy in the toy shop. My father said, 'No, you go and build it yourself.'

My daughter makes great jewellery and my son wants to pursue engineering. They've both been indoctrinated by the school of Linley. People want to get back to painting, building, exploring what their creative sides can do - it's something all human beings crave.

I've seen that, over the centuries, India has still got its passion and its soul. Wherever you go, people have such inner strength and beauty.

There are so many super yachts being built nowadays. I don't know where the people go with them. Because the people who can afford them haven't got the time to use them.

I reckon if you stick to the same thing every day for lunch when you are traveling, you know where you are. And it is one less decision to make.

My design teachers were teaching us how to mass-manufacture; how to create something, but it's not lasting - it's always about the next trend, it's the next thing.

On a fine day, I'm a keen cyclist.

I have bought and sold and bought and sold things that have given me great pleasure over the years, and I find I go through phases of what I'm passionate about. And then the next thing comes along, and so the only way of being able to collect the next one is to sell a few of the other ones.