I always had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically.

Now, we know this is what [H.P.] Lovecraft was into. Because he kept talking about how he wasn't interested in religion. In a heaven state there is no religion, meaning that you're seeing the whole thing ... I mean, to worship something means that it's something beyond you, right? In other words, it's not being revealed to you.

Any sort of working drawings are simply diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work that way.

I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, "You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer?" I said, "Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me."

At one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak, and speak myself and that kind of stuff.

[Nikola Tesla] would do it through lucid dreaming. He would, in a sense, dream up the engine, forget about it, come back, and then discover where it was wearing. You know, where the parts were wearing out. Now, that's inner visualization and a half! And that was the secret of why he did so many inventions.

I said, "Well, why do you believe in the Klein Bottle?" He said, "Because I can imagine it." I said, "You don't have to imagine a Mobius strip. It's right there in front of you!" But [Buckminster Fuller] couldn't see how that could involve a cross cap, meaning something that couldn't be reduced to a two-dimensional surface. Which it does. It's because he was thinking that the matrix was the thing that a fly could walk over the edge of, like a torus.