The culture of France is unique because it's a culture that has a high priority on the arts, more than any other place in the world in our time since Greece. So as a practicing artist, if you will, this is home ground. They love us, so music, literature, art continues to be the center.

I'm going to design the container and interior spaces. You bring your own stuff to it and make it your own.

There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.

I attended a lecture by a gray-haired old man from Finland, who later I discovered was the architect Alvar Aalto. I was very moved. I wasn't interested in architecture, but it was a moving thing I've never forgotten.

And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.

We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.

My father probably - he had flashes of creativity - he used to do store windows for fruit stores that he worked in and stuff.