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

My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies.

I'm inspired by a lot of stuff. I always was interested in sculpture and painting and music and literature and all those things. There's no one thing.

One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

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

One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn't seen before.

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