I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.

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.

Keep your sense of humor. There's enough stress in the rest of your life to let bad shots ruin a game you're supposed to enjoy.

I won't predict anything historic. But nothing is impossible.

You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well.

Everyone talks about success, but what happens before? There's always something you have to overcome.

Poetry allows me to write about what I don't know, whereas journalism demands a higher level of certainty to be worthy of being written.

I do not love the sea. The look of it is disquieting. There is something in the very sound of it that stirs the premonition felt while we listen to noble music; we become inexplicably troubled.

Is that all?" she whispered. Gansey closed his eyes. "That's all there is.

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.