Search the Archive

"God is the answer when we don't know the answer."

"I think if I directly design their apartment, I will not help them... If you are rich and famous and you buy an apartment and you don't know what to do, you will rent an interior designer. But in the …"

"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 …"

"Nobody is obliged to be genious but everybody is obliged to participate."

"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 …"

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

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

"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…"

"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."

"I am sort of a modern monk. My wife and I have a collection of cabins in the middle of nowhere, and we stay out of everything. We don’t go to dinners. We don’t go to cocktails. We don’t go to movies. …"

"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."

"y main task when I was artistic director at Thomson for four years: to make the company virtuous. Not because there was a desire there to do evil, but because they had simply forgotten their purpose i…"

"I have refused everybody, including A-list celebrities."

"You must have your own responsibility, your own consciousness."

"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, cr…"

"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…"

"Everything I do is a symbol. Everything, has a meaning."

"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 questi…"

"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 sa…"

"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."