Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.

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.

A boo is a lot louder than a cheer.

There are several grave consequences that come with lack of knowledge, the paramount is destruction.

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

That's the whole point of... of prosecutorial discretion in the judicial system. It's finding a just outcome in an individual case.

If any other religious cult knew so few basic facts about its own seminal beliefs as the liberal cult does about Joe McCarthy, Janet Reno would gas them.

I think I do overshare, and I sometimes marvel that I do it. But it's sort of - in a way, it's my way of trying to understand myself.

Become aware of your negative expectations and practice replacing them with positive expectations.

Usually it takes a bottle of Bacardi and a gallon of Coke to get John out of his seat.

I wasn't taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn't writing anything.