Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

You have to believe in a placebo or it wont work, but if it works, its obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.