My buildings are all on budget.

You never build the perfect building. Only Allah is perfect. Life is such. You make decisions on conclusions, then some guy invents something else and the world changes. That's comforting. There's no one way to use museums, no one way to do art. That also means there is no one way to build museums.

You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it.

I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

The safety requirements, which are necessary, spread everything out and push people farther and farther away from the stage and from each other.

I don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant.