Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable.

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.

Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.

I'm a do-gooder liberal.

We're physiologically wired differently.

Here we are surrounded by material that's being manufactured in unimaginable quantities worldwide and is used everywhere. I don't like it, no one likes it, and yet it's pervasive. We don't even see it.

I don't micromanage the interiors. People ask me to and I say no. I don't want to control everything.