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

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.

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 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.

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.

Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.

No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.