Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.

Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

The good is not a category that interests me.

Find optimism in the inevitable.

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

We must be able to love other people or forever endure the stain of disgraceful loneliness. By recognizing and expressing empathy for other people, we come to accept our own fallibility.

A genius is a person who is more observant and has more patience.

I grew up with "Follies." I saw it when I was fifteen. It was the original production, and of course, that production will never be equaled.

On the path to love, impossibilities are resolved by turning non-love into love.

Very intimate but very separate at the same time'. That's my credo for friendship.

Alcohol has never caused anyone to do something they didn't want to do. It only enables them to do what they've always wanted but have instead repressed.

What's important to me is that I put messages out, whether it's a TED talk, whether it's a book.

I'm never going to be like, "Oh, this attention from women sucks." It's flattering 99 percent of the time.

It is better to do something than to do nothing while waiting to do everything.

I think the best comedies came out during the Depression. Personally.