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

When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.

Generally in our world, whether in architecture or almost anywhere else, we devalue the artist, and schools at whatever level shut people down.

I used to read more when I was a kid than I do now. It was all sort of fuel for the fire to teach you how to think and how to make things and it informed the architecture that I was doing. It's better coming in with that history and that kind of knowledge and depth of understanding of humanity that is very important for building buildings - for understanding people and how they should live and how you could make your lives better and stuff like that.

Everybody's an artist. Unfortunately we don't treat them as such.

Picasso could use everyone's paintings and transform them into his own. He was using ideas from all of his contemporaries.

When I was a child I could do math and art, so I had left- and right-brain capabilities. But I've seen my children, who are more right-brained, struggling. My son was told he wouldn't make it to college, but he dogged it through and ended up being accepted by 10 major art schools after the high school advisor said, "Please don't apply. You're going to be disappointed." That kid's an artist now.