Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

Everybody's got a worldview, whether they know they have it or they don't. They might even get it when they are little tiny kids. Suppose they get it when they are in college, which is often the case, or in high school, whatever. Everything they learn after that or every thing they see after that, they fit it into that worldview. And they are making coherence of what's good, what's bad, what will work, what won't work, what's noble, what's ignoble, and so on... all through this filter.

There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.

[ René Lévesque] didn't understand why things do collapse. It's usually a very banal reason why things do collapse. It's not a grand reason, why they collapse economically, at least in the West.

Reactions [on my 1979 Massey lectures] were from Anglophones. I'm one. But I'm terrible at French. In fact, there was practically no reaction.

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.