Top 35 Peter Marino Quotes

Creating work for the time that one lives in means no retro thinking. It can and hopefully does mean timelessness.

Universal human characteristics are a good base for great art.

Ginza! Where I’ve done two Chanel towers and Louis Vuitton and Dior stores. I just feel at home there.

I don’t sell anything. So, I have a personal image, but I think that’s because I’m from an art background, and I’m an artist, and I think most artists do have personal images. I consider myself more in that category of the way an artist had a look.

I do really modern with materials that are so luxurious that they’re, like, baroque.

What frustrates me is florists who put everything at the same size on the table. I like it when there’s mountains and valleys.

I’m really a fighter against modernism equaling brutalism.

I’ve benefited enormously from an arts education and a music education in New York. When they cut the programs for funding, I was devastated.

If something’s a high-margin product, I understand its importance to the store.

When I opened Chanel in London, they were happy. People would go, ‘Oh, I just came in to see it. It’s so beautiful.’ And you leave with a positive attitude toward the brand. Now, you don’t really get that online. You don’t go, like, ‘Wow.’

I collect art like other people eat pizza. I can’t get enough of it. I need a constant source of inspiration.

I always look for inspiration, and the creativity of artists is an essential element to my life, my work, and my happiness.

If I need a pair of tennis shorts, I’ll buy them online. I don’t really care. Not going to go and try on a pair and see how my bum looks. Who cares? But for things that you care about – I mean, a jacket and a pair of trousers, you’ve got to try them on.

My father’s house was on East 55th Street on 1st and 2nd Avenues. I’m fifth-generation Marino in the East 50s – I live on 57th Street. I can’t be more East 50s.

The French use gardens to show grandeur and the English to show how things have endured for hundreds of years, but for me, they’re all about fantasy.

There’s a very important aspect to all my work, now more than ever, which is tying the interior design and architecture with the art.

I like more the fact that I like to think out of the box. Thinking out of the box goes along with dressing out of the box and living out of the box.

Anytime I see an unusual combination of colors or patterns or texture, I buy it.

I simply loathe the crude 1960s distinctions between commerce and art. For me, Warhol and pop obliterated all of those separations – that was the whole point of the Brillo Boxes and Campbell’s Soup Cans. And believe it or not, in 2009, moronic journalists are still saying to me, ‘Your work is so commercial.’

That was really the Fifties for me – that whole spirit of flicking the paint on the canvas.

Koishikawa Korakuen Garden – one of Tokyo’s oldest Japanese gardens, and one of the best spots for viewing the cherry blossoms.

All bronzes are made to be touched. Bronze is a sensual ‘living’ material. The sweat and oil of your palms adds to the patination.

It’s a good marriage because each of us is what we are, allows the other one to be themselves, and appreciates each other for the right reason. You know, it’s rare that you’ll find two people who don’t try to change the other person and let everyone be what they are.

We have a thousand hydrangea plants bordering the house, and they were all supposed to be pink, but a handful of them keep turning purple.

I have this ‘Alice in Wonderland’ idea in my head that a garden should be a place of wonderment.

Publicity doesn’t really get me anything. Clients are not going to hire me for a $100 million building because I have a brand. They really want the product.

If you want to come up with a really original design idea, and you want to capture a whole new design direction, perhaps the best way to arrive at that is not by acting and thinking and doing like everybody else. That’s all.

In 1991, if someone came in with a $1 million budget for a boutique, I would have fainted. Nobody spent even half that. But now, the bar has risen very high.

Motorcycle garb is the way I looked to Warhol. Then came the Armani suits.

I loathe when architects only analyze architecture in intellectual, nonvisual ways. I really love direct response, and that’s very pop. I don’t want to discuss abstract transparencies with a bunch of kooks.

I don’t talk about myself in the third person. When I start doing that, you’ll know I’m having an out-of-body experience.

I want to be the first person to animate bags – everything done for handbags bores me to tears – I want to make it more playful.

My parents spent a lot of money so I wouldn’t sound like I came from Queens. I went to speech class.

I am very happy working for my European brands. My legacy isn’t going to be a museum. Yet I would be very good at it. It’s so painful. It’s like everything – the same old guys – Herzog & de Meuron, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano – they don’t pick original people.

One of my first fashion clients was Calvin Klein. We did his first freestanding stores. He was very exact and precise. But talk about high-fashion people who brand themselves!