He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.

I never thought it was fair that anatomy decided what my brain was fit for.

What's interesting about architects is, we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature, and arguably, beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature.

I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It's basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.

What I say is that we're capable of a transcendent response, and I think it makes us happy. And I do think beauty produces a transcendent response.

I still don't know what the film was about because all I remember is a whole lot of technical dialogue about a body in a suitcase.

I had been a journalist in Europe and then went to divinity school in the early 1990s, and came out as somebody who had the perspective of a journalist and was now also theologically educated.

Years on end, and swords on end - where will it end, if our ears unbend - what shall I spend on a wrinkled friend in a pair of tights like a bunch of lights?

If our friends' idealizations of us need the corrective of our own experience, it may be true also that our own sordid view of our lives needs the corrective of our friends' idealizations.

Nobody really expects a Nobel Prize call

Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be misappraised.