Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am content to be a bric-a-bracker and a Ceramiker.
Well-crafted things inspire me, whether it's pottery or art or music.
I do pottery. I love it. It's very relaxing; it takes me to another planet.
The very "marks" on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy.
My decorating and renovation skills are nil - indeed, I once used a shower curtain from Pottery Barn as 'window dressing.
And as far as I know about Alix's [MacKenzie] work, I don't believe she ever did any sculptural work at all. It was always pottery.
If I hadn't been a designer, I'd have been a painter. I began as a painter and learned the craft of pottery in order to support myself.
If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you'd be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here.
Journalists like to say I started off sweeping the pottery floors. But it was just a short-lived part time job doing that after I left school.
For the longest time I was afraid I'd have to keep on working at the factories. There was a steel mill and a pottery; if you didn't go to college, you went to work in those places.
I want to learn how to pick locks, swordfight, throw pottery - it's all research. It's like the curious person's version of James Bond's license to kill. I've got a license to learn.
We got a great benefit from our contact with those people [Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Richard Batram] and met people that we wouldn't have probably met if we had simply worked at the pottery.
I quite like antiques. I like things that are old and the history they bring with them. I would rather fly to Morocco on an $800 ticket and buy a chair for $300 than spend $1,100 on one at Pottery Barn.
Living with [Bernard] Leach, who thought about pottery 24 hours a day, was a fantastic experience, and we really began to get inside his mind and understand what had motivated him to work all his life as a potter.
It was there that we really first came in contact with the work of Shoji Hamada, who was Bernard's best friend from Japan, who had come from Japan back to England with [Bernard] Leach when Leach was establishing his pottery.
I've got one of those over-stuffed leather chairs from the Pottery Barn. It faces north. I live in San Francisco, so there's the Golden Gate Bridge off to the left, and there's Alcatraz off to the right, and I've got a pile of pulp fiction next to me, and there's usually a decent bottle of red wine next to the fireplace.
In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.
In the Leach Pottery we did most of our work on the wheel. [Bernard] Leach did a little work in the studio, which was press-molded forms, plastic clay pressed into plaster forms to make small rectangular boxes and some vase forms, which he liked to make. These were molds which had been made to an original that he had modeled in solid clay, and during our work there, sometimes I would be pressing these forms as a means of production.
