If you're lucky, and a building succeeds, the real product has many more dimensions than you can ever imagine. You have the sun, the light, the rain, the birds, the feel.

When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.

My buildings should have an emotional core –a space which, in itself, has an emotional nice feeling.

I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space.

I've said goodbye to the overworked notion that architecture has to save the world.

Architecture is not about form

Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.

Presence is like a gap in the flow of history, where all of [a] sudden it is not past and not future.

What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.

In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.

When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. Matthew 2:10

A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information.

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

If you're a painter, paint. But you don't have to put Jesus in every picture. Paint well, and if you paint well enough, they might ask you why you do that.

The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure.

It is not enough to be wise, one must be engaging.

In life, when presented with any situation, breathe, take your time, focus and then decide what to do.

We always sold 4 or 5 million records no matter what we did.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.

Weep not, sweet queen, for trickling tears are vain.