Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist.

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.

You find love, not by looking, but by giving away.

I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.

I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on. -Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine

It's a funny thing, but today the Titanic is probably much more - that is people are much more aware of it than they were in 1954, when I was doing my research.

Clutter is postponed decisions.

When you define the audience, the performer becomes what the audience wants. Politicians do that all the time.

Your stockings prove your virtues. Be certain they are clean and free of tears.

If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.

I got an answering machine for my phone. . . . Now, when I'm not home and somebody calls me up . . . they hear a recording of a busy signal.

I think I got a lot of life skills; I got a lot of wisdom; I've seen a lot of bad things happen to a lot of good people.