A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .
Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.
Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.
Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.
By all means break the rules...
Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.
If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain – and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
Poetry, I’m often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.
Popularity isn’t just something that happens. You have to give something in exchange for it, and that’s the dangerous part of the process.
Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.
When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you’ve given enough, your place is near the centre.
With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.
Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?
The designer always has to leave room for the gods.
A myth is a hypothesis about the personality of reality itself and not the personalities of individual persons, character types, or nations.
An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns – but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.
Typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn.
What shall I do with the night and the day, with this life and this death?