When you look at the work you do every day, you do see things. But if you look at the work you did for 25 years, suddenly you start to get a more complete picture.

I've always liked the idea of making things that last forever, not necessarily in the sense of being unbreakable, but more psychologically permanent. Most people throw stuff away not because it's broken but because their relationship with that object is broken.

My mom and dad had a store, and sometimes people would return broken stuff. I'd take it apart and reassemble it. At 16, I really understood the architecture of things.

I like to find areas where design has not yet gone.

I have been a designer all my life, and design, for me, is to share love and trust and show the future in a beautiful way. I have worked on this principle all my life.

Designers have been uncreative and very arrogant. They need to listen to people. People have always wanted more exciting, interesting design, but we designers didn't see it.

Whether or not you like an object, it's the product of an individual person making decisions about things. That's what makes it interesting.

We are buying stuff we know we don't need, and that is a problem we should face in design. It starts with creating an object that transports through time a valuable idea: that it can live forever.

A good gift celebrates the relationship between the giver and the receiver. When you open that box, you feel like, 'Wow, you really understood me.' At the same time, you think this gift could come only from that person.

Function is fundamental to design, of course. If something doesn't work, it's a bad product, and I certainly get frustrated by things that aren't functional. But there has to be more than function. A house has to function, but if that's all it does, you don't love it.

So much in design is presented as a big miracle when it's just a repetition of what's been happening for 80 years.

I wear mascara sometimes, a little lip gloss.

In tech, people want an object for what's inside it, what it does. You need to make a defensive design that people won't walk away from. A chair is aggressive - you want a customer to choose it from many others.

To me, relaxing doesn't mean that we play ding-dong songs and look at a wall of bamboo. It's just completely unoriginal.

An object should elicit desire, and often it happens not because people need it but because they love it.

Modernism is an outmoded way of thinking about design: it just doesn't reflect the way we live now. It always puts forward this idea that the past is irrelevant to tomorrow - and tomorrow is all that matters. But the past is part of who we are.

If I look at my own growth, I started in product design. And we grew and created new products, and we were also able to change the idea of design a few times.

A product can live on one great idea. An interior needs 1,000 great ideas to really live, which makes interior design a whole orchestration of this art of juxtaposition, placement, and combination.

When I wrote my book about Amsterdam, the main objective was to talk about the city's creativity rather than just its design.

The 'Dezeen's of this world are extremely inspirational but have no realistic dimension any more.

I'm 100 percent sure the love and energy we give to a project will end up inside of it. I think it's important that when we work on something, we do it with positive intentions, because this energy will be sensed in the design.

What's special about Amsterdam is that the city is able to connect worlds that are not otherwise connected.

Inspiration has become this word that people tend to talk about as something from the outside. The truth is that... it is inside, like a burning fire: it is the feeling of certainty that your life has a meaning and you'll do something important.

Food has always been at the frontier of creativity.