“New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.”

Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history.Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who have a horror of a vacuum and those with a horror of the things that fill it. Translated into domestic interiors, this means people who live with, and without, clutter.

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.

I don’t have any delusions of grandeur or delusions of failure. In terms of my work, I’ve got a pretty cold honest eye.

The scale and grandeur of the Russian effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.

There is a certain grandeur.

To answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.

The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.

Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.