Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.

My father always told me that I was going to be a failure - I think he was more talking about himself, but I didn't know it at the time.

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. "The client made me do this." "The city made me do this." "Oh, the budget." I don't believe that anymore.

I promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80.

I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.

Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.

You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.