My father would conclude his dissertations by saying, "Of course, [Albert] Einstein never believed in gravity. It was a distortion of space." And so my father couldn't believe that an attraction at a distance was a reality.

I started with "Pickman's Model," because it was about Boston. I mean, what I loved about [H. P. Lovecraft], at first is his sense of scholarship of an area, setting an environment, enlivening it. I think that's one of the secrets of writing.

[Buckminster Fuller] always liked to say that he got kicked out of Harvard three times. Mostly you only got kicked out once, but he kept coming back.

I actually challenged The Theosophical Society on their concept of planes of reality. I said, "What you're doing is, you're stacking two-dimensional surfaces in three-space. And you are not going into any other dimensions at all." And they were furious, because they thought I was attacking Madame [Elena] Blavatsky.

I mean, even New York isn't in any great shape anymore in relation to the rest of the world.

Look at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with [Pablo] Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch that I'm working on.

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