I dont remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

You can put down a bad book; you can avoid listening to bad music; but you cannot miss the ugly tower block opposite your house.

Light has not just intensity, but also a vibration, which is capable of roughening a smooth material, of giving a three-dimensional quality to a flat surface.

If you have total freedom, then you are in trouble. It's much better when you have some obligation, some discipline, some rules. When you have no rules, then you start to build your own rules.

Architects have to dream, we have to search for our Atlantises, to be explorers, adventurers, and yet to build responsibly and well.

When a man is not satisfied with a house where he lives, he becomes an architect

Architecture is art, but art vastly contaminated by many other things. Contaminated in the best sense of the word – fed, fertilised by many things.

You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony

A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.

Architecture is an imposed art in some ways, imposed upon the public, so people must be sure about what you're doing. You have to be sure about what you're doing.

Knowing how to do things not just with the head, but with the hands as well: this might seem a programmatic and ideological goal. It is not. It is a way of safeguarding creative freedom.

The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.

If love wasn't conditional, everybody would be in love with everybody.

Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us - in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.

Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.

The purists are small in number but, you know hardy of voice.

I like the idea of not being afraid of letting your imagination rule you, to feel the freedom of expression, to let creativity be your overwhelming drive rather than other things.

Even sickness becomes an experience that we pass through in happiness because our happiness is not dependent upon how our body feels, but how our spirit feels.

Doesn't every generation feel like the one that's coming up behind them doesn't know how to grow up? I'm not sure if we're progressively getting worse or if your perspective shifts.

he was the monster that stalked nightmare and they both knew it

Speaking more than one language and living in a multicultural family and environment did not seem like anything but what it was: the world I lived in.