Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me.

Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

The good is not a category that interests me.

Find optimism in the inevitable.

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

His eyes widened just a bit, his lips flexed. I realized he was trying not to laugh. I hate it when people find my threats amusing.

And now abideth faith hope charity these three but the greatest of these is charity.

Though we live amid promiscuous pressures, spiritual clutter and forgetfulness, we probably still value the integrity of life.

Fear is the anticipation of the pain in the future. Anger is the remembrance of pain in the past. Hostility is wanting to get even.

The government can't get away with large-scale famine, but it can get away with chronic hunger. It has become an accepted part of life in India.

I think as a kid I never really understood the magnitude of a hurricane and what it could do.

I'm never really nervous because I've done the maximum; now it's up to the audience to do its job.

I love all the cableknits and the oversize coats.

Laws which are consistent in theory often prove chaotic in practice.

The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.