“Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.”

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.

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

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.

I believe there are two periods in life, one for the bike, the other for becoming active on one’s work.

I was a bad student. I liked archaeology actually, I was interested in maybe becoming an archaeologist but I was such a bad student and had such bad grades that I wasn’t going to get into any really good college so I fell back on acting.

Jesus Christ knew the only way He would stop Satan is by becoming one in nature with him…He became one with the nature of Satan, so all those who had the nature of Satan can partake of the nature of God.

I didn’t want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.

The ugly duckling is a misunderstood universal myth. It’s not about turning into a blonde Barbie doll or becoming what you dream of being; it’s about self-revelation, becoming who you are.

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming someone else, or something else, whose memory may not include the significance of old markers.

Sometimes life isn’t about who you were or are, but it’s about who you are becoming.

I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was…it wasn’t until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.