“I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”

People with really weak characters cause an immense amount of suffering in the world. They destroy whole civilisations.

A discipline I have observed is an attitude of love and reverence to people.

It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.

Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.

Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.

Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don’t think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.

Filthy McNasty’s and I said, I need these things and now fill it in with other iconic buildings.

I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

And there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else’s drawing sounds like going back to heaven.

It always surprises me when donors who operate successful businesses assume that just building a school structure means that a community now has access to education.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

But as I’ve gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn’t actually account for the world.

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.

Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.