Quotes from Michael Graves

In America, writers are afforded the freedom to express themselves in unlimited manners. Creative liberty is a privilege.

Amply described blowjobs and anal scenes may stigmatise gay writers.

Someone once told me they didn't like taking the lid off the kettle because they'd just lose it in the kitchen, so we made a kettle with an attached lid that you slide. It was in response to that that we made one that did something different.

I don't care what people call me, labels have the negative value of making smaller boundaries for people.

Form must never trump function. Some objects are made to look so smooth, you don't know where to pick them up or how to turn them on. If I'm designing a garlic press or cheese grater, I need my hand to fit comfortably on it. I like to know, instinctively, how to use it.

I had been designing for Alessi and Swid Powell and Steuben and high-end people, and people always complained, 'Michael, we'd love to buy your stuff, but it's too expensive.'

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

The avant garde is so narcissistic.

I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 - it was my nickname.

I believe well-designed places and objects can actually improve healing, while poor design can inhibit it.

My favorite project is always the next one.

The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century.

Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for.

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

If I have a style, I am not aware of it.

Views are overrated; it's light that counts. I have an apartment in Miami's South Beach, and I get tired of looking at the ocean. Even that view gets old after a while. Sunlight streaming into a room - it never gets old.

Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else, it is also about the cultural setting and the ambience, the whole affair.

Architectural and product designs have a narrative capacity - you can start to tell a story about them and imagine a lot of things.

The Alessi relationship and the Target one has broadened the role of architects in society and broadened the concept that design belongs to everyone.

I'm working on a school of architecture in China. It's rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I'm so pleased that they asked me.

In America, writers are afforded the freedom to express themselves in unlimited manners. Creative liberty is a privilege.

It was always my goal to 'up the ante' on good design and rye devoted much of my career to this

It was always my goal to 'up the ante' on good design, and I've devoted much of my career to this.

If I have a style, I am not aware of it.