I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

I can't shout out, "Do this." I don't want to be prescriptive. I want to give you facts, and that's the way I've always operated, whether it's a historical fact or a scientific fact, and then you actually have to connect it in your brain.

I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.

My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.

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.

I do think the smaller-scale studio works have that incredible love of data crunching, whereas I would say the large-scale earthworks tend to be much more stripped-down. With the mappings, as connected as they are to a much more analytical idea, what's a map? And can I make a map about time? I think the first time was Hurricane Sandy, the flood plane; a moment in time, but indelibly marked on any of us who were in the city. Mapping time is something that I'm really interested in.