We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt... To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing.

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.

The inspired words, which flush my mind, come from a higher power!

I can push them away, fight them, or ignore them but family is something you can never get rid of.

we were justlooking for what couldinstead of what waswhat should beinstead of how it was

Never under any circumstances permit anyone to belittle your self-worth.

Christmas is love.

The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.

Got to be the worst place in the world, inside a oven. You in here, you either cleaning or you getting cooked.

Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.

I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where we can say this is the template, this is the checklist, that must be met [for intervention].

Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.