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Art & Creativity Quote by Marc Newson

"I don't like to make my life like a book"

About this Quote

“I don’t like to make my life like a book” is a designer’s quiet refusal of the era’s loudest demand: narrate yourself. In a culture that treats every career as a hero’s journey and every dinner as a caption, Marc Newson’s line reads like a minimalist object placed in a maximalist room. It’s not anti-story so much as anti-packaging.

The intent feels practical, almost procedural. Newson’s work is associated with sleek surfaces, precision, and an almost frictionless inevitability. A “book” implies chapters, arcs, foreshadowing, a tidy meaning revealed on schedule. Designers, especially at Newson’s altitude, know how seductive that kind of coherence can be - it’s the same impulse that turns a messy process into a clean portfolio case study. He’s signaling a preference for process over plot: live, make, iterate, move on.

The subtext is also a jab at personal branding. “Making my life like a book” suggests actively curating experience into a consumable narrative, as if existence were content and the self were a product line. Newson distances himself from that performance. It’s an insistence on privacy, but also on contingency: the best ideas often arrive from detours, not from a prewritten arc.

Context matters: a global celebrity-designer inhabits a world of glossy profiles and auction-ready mythology. The quote deflates that mythology. It’s a reminder that the work can be the throughline without the life needing to pretend it has one.

Quote Details

TopicLive in the Moment
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Newson, Marc. (2026, January 16). I don't like to make my life like a book. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-like-to-make-my-life-like-a-book-93545/

Chicago Style
Newson, Marc. "I don't like to make my life like a book." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-like-to-make-my-life-like-a-book-93545/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I don't like to make my life like a book." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-like-to-make-my-life-like-a-book-93545/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Marc Newson (born October 20, 1963) is a Designer from Australia.

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