Large-scale public projects require the agreement of large numbers of people.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

Architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

I'm interested in conflict and confrontation.

You can't make anything authentic by asking people what they want because they don't know what they want. That's what they're looking at you for.

We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.

I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table.

The multiplicity of ideas is what Im interested in.

I've been such an outsider my whole life.

Sometimes Jonathan [Powell] and myself would go to Tony [Blair] and ask him if he was absolutely sure about this or that. That was our job. But ultimately it was his decision.

I, as a Muslim woman living in 1993, I want to have two things - the mosque and the satellite, both at the same time. And no one can mutilate me by telling me I cannot have the mosque or the Koran.

So I'm wearing that today. And I wore it yesterday, too. Maybe I'll wear it tomorrow. I just collect stuff, I guess.

There should be a vaccine against Adam Black. And all women should be given it at birth.

A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.

For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.

Prayer can come in only when fasting has done its work. It can make fasting easy and bearable.

Playing an old record doesn't interest me at all. It's exactly the opposite of what I want to do.

The film argues to the young that the old were young once, too, and contain within them all that the young know, and more.

I definitely try to broaden the scope of music. I don't know if it's pop or classical or what, but I'm religiously challenging myself all the time, for better or for worse.