Top 18 Quotes by Dan Phillips

We have cultural expectations that everyone needs a dining room, yet they're only used three times a year. But if I put a bone handle on the door of an upper-end brick home, I'm making an outlandish statement.

If you have multiples of anything, you have the possibility of repetition. Repetition creates pattern and also unity. Put anyone in a room with a pile of similar objects and say, 'I want a pattern by 3 P.M. or no dinner.' Anyone would come up with a design. It is easy, fun and available to anybody. Most people just don't have the nerve.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

Repetition creates pattern. If I have a hundred of these, a hundred of those, it doesn't make any difference what these and those are. If I can repeat anything, I have the possibility of a pattern from hickory nuts and chicken eggs, shards of glass, branches. It doesn't make any difference.