Top 60 David Linley Quotes

Words matter. These are the best David Linley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Personally, I find the world of memorabilia fascinating

Personally, I find the world of memorabilia fascinating: how people get so focused on one genre, music, or person.
David Linley
I loved the idea of evolving traditional methods and design to make products that last but are also relevant for the modern age.
David Linley
Our chief aim is to make beautiful things that will last forever.
David Linley
Beeswax is always preferable to chemical polishes because it does not destroy the natural surface of wood.
David Linley
It’s far nicer to congregate around a card table than a television. It takes me back to my childhood, when we’d play family card games like Racing Demon.
David Linley
Since childhood, Claridge’s has always been a very special place for me. I associate it with celebrations, happy times.
David Linley
I love wood. I love its permanence, its way of changing hue over the years, its way of expanding and contracting, of moving or aging and growing better and more beautiful with time.
David Linley
Ideally you should try to buy upholstered items that have retained their original fillings of horsehair, wool or down, because they provide a much more satisfying shape than when they have been replaced with foam rubber or other modern materials.
David Linley
When I left Parnham aged 18, I could easily have ended up twiddling my thumbs in a workshop all week. But I lucked out and found an agent who immediately got me work and before long there was enough demand for my furniture to start a shop.
David Linley
My parents had this extraordinary circle of friends. My father would be photographing somebody every day, someone from the world of the arts, a politician, a musician, a sportsman.
David Linley
London is a series of villages, really. I like that.
David Linley
Life, work, money – everything is such a battle. It’s just nice to sit down at home, look at one thing, and think, ‘Hmmm. A man made that.’
David Linley
I am not really a football man but I have always supported Chelsea because we lived there. We have been through the lows.
David Linley
Horse Guards is my favourite building in London.
David Linley
I really do build furniture to be used, you see, to be lived with.
David Linley
I’ve lived all over London, as I like moving from place to place.
David Linley
My daughter does sewing, needlepoint and very good drawings. My son plays the piano.
David Linley
There was a time when craft used to mean anything but the considered, stylish or academic. It was a term of derision. The ‘craft fair’ on the village green was to be avoided.
David Linley
My grandmother started my interest in secret doors, trying to find things she lost, and we found an old letter in a great bookcase with a round facade.
David Linley
My dining room table is just a huge, great thick slab of oak on a beautiful frame. Whenever people come to supper I invite them to carve their name in it.
David Linley
America is wonderful.
David Linley
Usually, when people think of marquetry, they think of Dutch 17th-century furniture with inlaid flowers and jugs. Our goal is to break down the barriers between old and new, to combine traditional marquetry techniques with a modern idiom.
David Linley
A lot of my pieces have involved teamwork, but hopefully they’ve inspired people to make things – that inspiration would be a great legacy.
David Linley
I love partridge and duck casseroles, and have been known to hunt my own game. It’s important to eat off the land where possible.
David Linley
Indian artists are working with a history that’s overwhelming and rich.
David Linley
I was very lucky, my parents were very encouraging, and both my grandmothers. They had exquisite taste.
David Linley
You can never split yourself from the family you were born into.
David Linley
My daughter makes great jewellery and my son wants to pursue engineering. They’ve both been indoctrinated by the school of Linley. People want to get back to painting, building, exploring what their creative sides can do – it’s something all human beings crave.
David Linley
Never bring an umbrella to the country – wear a tweed cap.
David Linley
If you cut me open, you would find bits of me looking at things with an aesthetic eye, also with a historical eye. But mostly at the way things have transported themselves through time.
David Linley
My design teachers were teaching us how to mass-manufacture; how to create something, but it’s not lasting – it’s always about the next trend, it’s the next thing.
David Linley
I'm incredibly boring and logical, so if I have a probl

I’m incredibly boring and logical, so if I have a problem I will try and fix that problem.
David Linley
We are no longer teaching young people to make things that are beautiful and of very high quality. We are not giving them the chance to learn how to create artefacts to a high standard of design and workmanship.
David Linley
Food and wine are my extravagances.
David Linley
Some of my best moments have been in friends’ libraries. They give you a sense of quiet, well-being and order that a media room does not.
David Linley
Californians are not so precious about their antiques, not so nervous about what others will think if they mix classic with modern, old with new.
David Linley
I love Burgundy but my favourite is a Bordeaux – Chateau Leoville-Barton.
David Linley
There was a submarine that I desperately wanted to buy in the toy shop. My father said, ‘No, you go and build it yourself.’
David Linley
The school I attended, Bedales, was fortunate to have been built by a leading light from the Arts and Crafts Movement in the 1890s. It contained a beautiful library, made originally of green oak and constructed with the help of the children.
David Linley
We are a modern family who need to live in a certain way.
David Linley
Beautiful engineering always held a fascination for me.
David Linley
Controlling the design of an everyday object is very satisfying.
David Linley
Pepys was such a meticulous person that he had little wooden blocks to make all the books on his shelves the same height.
David Linley
I like to say we can make anything in wood.
David Linley
There are so many super yachts being built nowadays. I don’t know where the people go with them. Because the people who can afford them haven’t got the time to use them.
David Linley
I’ve seen that, over the centuries, India has still got its passion and its soul. Wherever you go, people have such inner strength and beauty.
David Linley
I’m not technically royal.
David Linley
My teaching was primarily focused on making, it wasn’t about the pounds, shillings and pence. I remember being in college and being in business and there was just a weekend in between.
David Linley
Good design is probably something that has been thoroughly thought through to a point of resolution.
David Linley
Nothing tests a marriage more than insomnia or snoring.
David Linley
People are fed up with mass production.
David Linley
The workshop to me always means great atmosphere, working, smell of wood, dust and, at the end of the day, you’ve created something.
David Linley
I’m a very methodical cook – it appeals to the logical side of my brain.
David Linley
My father and I share a passion for how things work, which in my case took the form of schoolboy fascination with machines and mechanical contraptions.
David Linley
On a fine day, I’m a keen cyclist.
David Linley
In the early 1980s, Linley was a cooperative. There were four of us who designed and made cabinets and desk accessories.
David Linley
I made an urban-looking bicycle that could stand up to potholes. Of course, it was stolen instantly – proof of the genius of its design.
David Linley
I used to sit and draw in the evening with a couple of crates of beer. That makes the ideas flow.
David Linley
I think there can be no replacement for teaching people how to make things by showing them how to stick two pieces of wood together.
David Linley
Most craft is, you know, terrible, absolutely terrible, so I don’t like the word, or the word ‘artisan’ either.
David Linley