But I find the best things I do, I do when I’m trying to avoid doing something else I’m supposed to be doing. You know, you’re working on something. You get bugged, or you lose...

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Space is the breath of art.

But I don’t see why we have to take a central hall, for instance, and use in it a sculpture or painting. I think it detracts, somehow.

Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.

The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.

Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we’ve both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.

TV is chewing gum for the eyes.

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what...

You’ve got to bumble forward into the unknown.

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

However, India is a democracy and they deeply believe in democracy and we feel that it would not be good to overwhelm them with propaganda.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

Freedom is from within.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I’d think, Where did they get that? I didn’t read that in there. Later...

The space within becomes the reality of the building.

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

Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe.

The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when...

I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they’re learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting.

Less is only more where more is no good.

Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

So I test all the buildings that I do by asking myself whether this building was possible, could have been built 50 years ago or a hundred years ago.

I feel coming on a strange disease – humility.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

I think really good books can be read by anybody.