The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.

I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.

Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

We know under Nebraska there is an underground aquifer that is probably underneath the whole state, but what form does it take? I kind of want to focus on that, for almost political means, because we keep digging more wells. We're not replenishing, and we're having a crisis in water around the world. But how do you visualize it? I don't know, so I know what I want to study.

When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.

The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning.