What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

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.

It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it's co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body - you can't help but be moved.

If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts.

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.