“Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,”

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.

Really living without clutter takes an iron will … This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife’s occupations, picking up.

It supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture’s essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance

The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale – and ultimately it is a gamble – demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.

The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

California … is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.

Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.

It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.

Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

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

Instability mostly comes from the interface between the fact that the banks (or shadow banks) can create credit, money, and purchasing power in infinite quantities

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

When I see a cheerful young man shrieking about how full of life he is, banging on a drum, and blowing on a tin trumpet, and speaking of his good spirits

Our real world has evolved. It’s become something much different, and inadvertently about healthcare, and about what it means to have good health, and to be able to have good health.

I’ve never read anything about heroin where, yeah, it’s a good experience, and you can do it for 20 years and enjoy it, like having a cold beer. It doesn’t work that way with heroin.