“I don’t think that anyone has really told (people) what design is. It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed–that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed.”

They’re partners in a big house where there are two separate courts, and they both know they have two separate courts. But these are courts that are allied in purpose, united in vision.

If there’s a simple, easy design principle that binds everything together, it’s probably about starting with the people.

Few people think about this or are aware of it. But there is nothing made by human beings that does not involve a design decision somewhere.

I like my parents but they are just not good parents. They are nice enough people. I’m not interested in hurting their feelings.

In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff.

To a woman–I mean, a nice woman–there is no such thing as men. There is a man; and either she is so fond of him that she can talk of nothing else, however unfavourably, or so much in love with him that she never mentions his name.

Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal.

God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.

It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader’s ear to hear anything of praise from him.

His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I’m sure, was in the right.

The difference between a gourmet and a gourmand we take to be this: a gourmet is he who selects, for his nice and learned delectation.