Robert Bringhurst Quotations

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.

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.

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 .

When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.

Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.

Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

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.

To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are. Design is to making as writing is to speech: it is an ordinary physical activity pushed to a conscious edge. That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all?

Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

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.