“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.”

Waiting is a special kind of activity – if activity is the right word for it – because we are held in enforced suspension between people and places, removed from the normal rhythms of our days and lives.

Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.

Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.

If you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. … their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.

In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.

. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.

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

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.

It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,

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.

A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.

There is no future for a people who deny their past.

The one thing that cannot be outsourced is creativity.

When you turn that fantasy into a fact, you are in a position to build even better fantasies. And that, my friend, is the Creative Process.

A successful life is an authentic life. Happiness and creativity rest on a foundation of transparency to yourself and others. Knowing your own heart and speaking clearly to others keep you on the path.

I could be a ninja, I could be a pirate or I could be in a play y’know.

It’s impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It’s the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.

We begin to not be human, as we’ve known it, any longer. But to be just creative minds and action, whereas right now we’re confused minds and actions, and our environment mirrors that back to us.