Alix [ MacKenzie] had stopped teaching because we had a child and she stayed home to take care of the baby, and I taught.

When we worked at the pottery, we did learn to make pots, that is, the physical act of making the pot. We learned to control clay, to put it where you want it and not just wherever it wanted to go, and that was valuable. At the end of about six months, though, I think if that was all we had, we may have been inclined to leave because the workshop did not challenge us so much as living with [Bernard] Leach did.

We both [with Alixandra Kolesky MacKenzie] got into ceramics, you might say, by the back door. Looking back on it, I think this was a very good thing.

We stayed on at the Institute [Chicago called the School of Design] because that was - I don't know, you start at one place and you stay there, I guess. Inertia takes over.

When I was in school in the Art Institute, we had several problems during the course of the time we were taking ceramic classes where we had to do a sculptural piece. And when I say a sculptural piece, it's nothing like what we conceive of now as a sculptural piece.

If you press-mold a pot or if you slab-build a pot, the work has got to take much, much, much longer than if you work on the wheel. And I to this day have the ideal that I want my work to be not too expensive, so that if people buy it and break it, it's not going to be the end of the world. I'm not interested in having things in museums, although some of our work has ended up there, but that's not what I'm striving for.

[Shoji] Hamada seldom drew an exact drawing of a pot that he was going to make.