“An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.”

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.

Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.

Every creative act draws on the past whether it pretends to or not. It draws on what it knows. There’s no such thing, really, as a creative act in a vacuum.

That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.

The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible… ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure

the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.

No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.

Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.

And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed

Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

I admire Peter Mandleson’s chutzpah and the way he transformed the Labour party but not his dubious ideas about Europe and industrial policy.

And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity.