“Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.”

Philip Johnson is a highbrow. A highbrow is a man educated beyond his capacity. His house is a box of glass — not shelter. The meaning of the word shelter includes privacy.

Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can’t nail them to a wall.

Give me the luxuries of life and I will gladly do without the necessities.

Youth is a circumstance you can’t do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.

We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.

Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm.

You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.

Freedom lies within.

Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.

A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advice his clients to plant vines.

Less is more only when more is too much.

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.

The Machine is Intellect mastering the drudgery of the earth that the plastic art may live; that the margin of leisure and strength by which man’s life upon earth can be made beautiful, may immeasurably widen; its function ultimately to emancipate human expression!

Early in my career, I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility… I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I’ve never been sorry.

A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.

The primitive ideals of centralization are now largely self-defeating. Human crucifixion by vertically on the now static checkerboard of the old city is pattern already in agony; yet for lack of any organic planning it is going on and on-not living, but rather hanging by its eyebrows from its nervous system.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art– Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite.

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.