Larry wanted us to reposition the tower. We wouldn't, and won't. He's been holding back our fees. We want to get paid. And that's it. It'll get solved and we'll carry on with planning Ground Zero.

You cannot suddenly make Lower Manhattan into a sad place because we saw such a dramatic loss of life. You have to balance the memory, which is so important, and use it as a kind of Archimedean Point to create a lively, incredibly interesting, and culturally significant piece of a city and neighborhood.

It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.

Our lives are complex; our emotions are complex; our intellectual desires are complex. I believe that architecture … needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess.

And you have to remember that I came to America as an immigrant. You know, on a ship, through the Statue of Liberty. And I saw that skyline, not just as a representation of steel and concrete and glass, but as really the substance of the American Dream.

Young people have the advantage because they have their whole lives open to be astonished.

When you're a kid with artistic yearnings brought up in the Bronx, you don't get fed up too easily.