The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.

There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last

Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.

Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.

It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure

Anger was the indulgence of a child, not a queen.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today.

I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.

It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.

I wasn't born a superstar.

Whatever you have to say, you say it from your heart.

I know you are, but you gotta push

Without my mother's ambition, her drive, I doubt that on my own I would have pushed myself out of Pozzuoli and into the frightening world that was faraway Rome.

I'd stop the world from spinning for you