I remember, as a young architect, people always talked about I. M. Pei's concrete. He had a particular specification no one else knew.

I was brought up to reuse things.

So much of what makes a room great is how you enter and circulate through it, how it addresses the body.

When you have rules to abide by, does that curtail you as a designer, or set you free? People think of classical architecture visually, but I think the brilliant part of it is actually spatial.

All clients think that they are architects.

Tension is an interesting quality - and architecture must have it. There should be elements of the inexplicable, the mysterious, and the poetic in something that is perfectly rational.

The secret of good architecture is having more than meets the eye.

I make spaces that are calm rather than confrontational. I seek a certain kind of logic that allows you to move in space and perceive it as beautiful and rational. Clarity is a worthwhile quality.

One of the things I've always loved about New York is there is so much precedent for ornament on industrial buildings.

What I do isn't radical. It's just distinct in small ways.

When everything is perfectly orderly and understandable, there has to be one thing that puts everything into question.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

I think pressure is a good thing and it's good to be able to feel it and use it and experience the feeling of it and especially if you can get past it.

Sometimes the best decisions in life are on the spur of the moment. So I generally try to do what I think is right. And sometimes I make mistakes.

Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is in their power to make a man happy.

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.

I don't think there is a right or wrong anymore. Only horrible and not-quite-so-horrible.

Even in the days of the tightest credit in 2008, HELOCs [ home equity line of credit ] and home equity loans were being made.

In a media-saturated world, persistent hype lends unwarranted credulity to the wildest claims.

You freeze with the number of opportunities given to you and just decide to do nothing at all.

It's about taking everything you thought was true and throwing it out the window. It's about embracing life's unpredictability, letting go of boundaries, and starting over