Frank Gehry Quotes

Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.

Time is just a blur for me. I don't know what - I don't even know where I am sometimes.

People ask me if I'm an artist or an architect. But I think they're the same.

Your best work is your expression of yourself.

In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures.

If you know where it's going, it's not worth doing.

You can look anywhere and find inspiration.

Not every person has the same kinds of talents, so you discover what yours are and work with them.

Take what comes your way. Do the best with it. Be responsible as you can and something good will happen.

You have to be optimistic. I still have doubts and conflicts, but the bottom line is, I believe in the future.

I found the material that people hated the most and used the most. So, I was going and try and see if I could play with it sculpturally.

The best advice I've received is to be yourself. The best artists do that.

We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.

There is stuff I would have liked to have done. But there are no sour grapes.

Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

Ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.

I love working. I don't know what the word vacation means.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

Those who say only artists and architects can create are the ones who are elitist.

The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself. I tell this to my students: It's not about copying me or my logic systems. It's about allowing yourself to be yourself.

The whole can be greater than the sum of it's parts, that we all have something to put in the pie to make it better, and that the collaborative interaction works.

I didn't have any interest in doing rich people's homes. I still don't.

That's where you have to look for your inspiration. Don't separate the rest of your life - who you are, what you love - from your work.

One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself.

Man, there's another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I'm interested in.

An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.

The fact is I'm an opportunist. I'll take materials around me, materials on my table, and work with them as I'm searching for an idea that works.

Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.

Let the experience begin!

When you agree to collaborate, you agree to jump off a cliff holding hands with everyone, hoping the resourcefulness of each will insure that you all land on your feet.

There are a great many things about architecture that are hidden from the untrained eye.

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

Childhood play is nothing more than an expression of our individuality and preparation for human interaction.

I like the idea of collaboration - it pushes you. It's a richer experience.

I promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80.

You've got to like the people you work with.

We're physiologically wired differently.

As much as we pretend otherwise, we want what's comfortable, and we're afraid of the different. We're afraid of change.

I don't know whose box I'm in, and I don't really care.

I'm a do-gooder liberal.

The idealism [in architecture] is in the formal arrangement, the relationship to the city, the use of materials that are available to me. That's where I say our powers are limited.

I refuse to work unless I get paid, so I don't get a lot of work sometimes.

There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.

Artists dismiss me as an architect, so I'm not in their box, and architects dismiss me as an artist, so I'm not in their box.

If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.