The Learners by Chip Kidd

"Now I'm trying to decide what kind of face the potato chip should have. That's always the question. Everything's a question."

"He looked over at a small table in the corner I hadn't noticed before. It was smudged with ink and dotted with mummified bits of masking tape and it was all I ever wanted and its beauty mocked me."

"I could feel it: everything he sketched, penciled, inked, made--was a payment, one he could scarcely afford, as if it physically hurt him to put pencil to paper. Yet that only seemed to spur him on, to live far beyond his means. He was unable not to. For Sketch, to draw was to breathe, and so the air became lead--silvery in the right light, dark soot in the wrong; heavy, slick, and malleable--into shapes he brought together in glorious orchestration, with a child's eye and a rocket scientist's precision, all fortified by a furious melancholy."

"Go ahead and slouch. Life is short, now you are, too."

"Antisappointment. Anticipation colliding head-on with the certainty of its own doom."

"Risks are risky things."