Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.

Once I really started to understand Frank Stella's work and follow it, there's a certain type of invention and playfulness and extreme rigor with which he kept going forward.

You couldn't forget Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better.

Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.

I think for a lot of artists, if you're lucky enough to have a kind of career, especially toward the end, you start to think about what the whole ensemble looks like. It's the whole that counts. The parts are given, but you don't know how the whole thing's going to look when it's all put together.

As far as I was concerned, with the early paintings, I liked them, I thought they were pretty good, but I didn't think it was the end of the world. I also thought of it as a kind of structure, a base to build on. So this proves I can do this and that, and they don't collapse, so then what can I do from here? How can I build on it?

There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.