Philippe Starck Quotes

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.

I have refused everybody, including A-list celebrities.

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.”

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. We don’t watch TV. I don’t use my energy on other people. I just work and read. I live with myself in front of my white page. Of course, for much of the year I have to travel, speak to journalists, engineers, things like that, and it’s the worst. But from the 15th of June to the 15th of September, I live completely secluded, locked in one of my houses, working from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, or making my own biorhythm: work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, for 24 hours, without eating. It’s a little sick. But I’m like Dr. Faust. I signed a contract with the devil to sell my life for creativity.

From a structural point of view, design is totally useless... I tried to give my products a little sense and energy. But even when I gave the best of myself, it was absurd.

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.

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.

You must have your own responsibility, your own consciousness.

D'un point de vue structurel, le design est totalement inutile... J'ai essayé de donner à mes produits un peu de sens et d'énergie. Mais même quand j'ai donné le meilleur de moi-même, c'était absurde.

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'.

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

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.

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

[M]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 in life - to be of service, to use their skills to be of service. It is essential to try to play the role of a friendly "enemy within". That is, to catch the interest of these big companies so that they make money available, and research facilities, and distribution networks, for this return to what is the origin of all their activities - to serve others. It even means changing the words they use. One of the things I did at Thomson was to change their name. Thomson used to be called TCE, Thomson Consumer Electronic, and I asked them: who wants to be a "consumer of electronics?"