I think that may be the biggest difference between Americans and people elsewhere. Unlike Americans, Canadians know that there are places just as real as Canada. It's a self-centeredness that's a very strange thing.

Americans have got it so dinged into them that they are the most fortunate people on Earth, and that the rest of the world - the sooner it copies what America is like, the better.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

The Japanese are virtuosos. They make just the little accent that makes all the difference. So much there is so beautiful - just a shop window display is a work of art. Just the way they make all kinds of things out of bamboo that are so ingenious. Just the way this little bamboo drain or latch is so beautiful. The masonry around the streams to hold the bank are beautiful - and not all one kind and not just cement.

I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general.

My mother used to say when we were children, 'When a boy gets a stick in his hand, his brains run out the other end of it.' Power is a stick in the hand, and I have never heard of anybody who wielded a very big stick of power whose brains did not run out the other end. As a nation, our brains are running out the other end of our power right now.