The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape

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.

Starting over is opportunity informed by failure, which is opportunity made intelligent.

The money you make is a symbol of the value you create.

Maybe I am the eye candy on the team, but the only mouth I plan on melting in is hers.

To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.

No man is much pleased with a companion who does not increase in some respect his fondness of himself.

I'm pretty freelance. A freelance meditator. I float from one thing to the other.

English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one will hold it against you.

...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.

Somewhere out there is a unique place for you to help others - a unique life role for you to fill that only you can fill.