The playful search for beauty.

When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.

If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas.

When you begin your work, nothing exists. When it is finished it looks as if it just happened, spontaneously, effortlessly, convincingly. It looks as though it had been there all along.

I think with my hands. I design things to be touched-not for a museum. A piece is ready when it has the shape of something to cherish.

My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists.

I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.