We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.

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.

Every true artist is at war with the world.

You'll become that devil overnight, if you want to become that celebrity overnight.

Hey. My life’s not all about weird little creatures pretending to be teddy bears.” From Tribe of the Teddy Bear.

Every problem contains the seeds of its own solution.

I always love the soapy conflicts between somebody's family of origin and their new family - 'Do I have Thanksgiving at my husband's parents' house, or at my parents' house?'

The Buddha is your real body, your original mind.

While it is important to win, it’s even more important to remain undefeated no matter what happens.

Every experience, however bitter, has its lesson, and to focus one's attention on the lesson helps one overcome the bitterness.

All my adult life I've been in the practice of giving advice to people who are happier than I am.

Delivered from the galling yoke of time.