People's first homes are always disasters. It's like the first time you have sex. It's never as good as later on. It always gets better.

I loathe when architects only analyze architecture in intellectual, nonvisual ways. I really love direct response, and that's very pop. I don't want to discuss abstract transparencies with a bunch of kooks.

The older I get, the less I negotiate. When you first start out, it's 90 percent negotiation and 10 percent suggestion. When you get to a certain point, those figures reverse.

Throughout history, from Abyssinians and Greeks onward, artists, sculptors, and architects have worked together. I find this post - World War II thing, this segmentation of the arts, so lame. It's the laming of the arts.

When you design someone's house, it's actually painful. I never say, "This house will be a total reflection of you and any defects in it will make you look defective." But people do expect their homes to be reflections of themselves. So what I say is, "Just pretend this is your eighth home. By then you won't care."

I wanted to be an artist, because it's a much better scam than being an architect.

After the motorcycle trips I take for one or two weeks, I have trouble getting back into a car, because I feel claustrophobic with all of that metal around me, and I can't see anything. I feel seriously dangerous in a car after riding on a bike, because your field of vision is so closed in. And then I think about all these little bourgeois people driving around in their cars - it's actually hideous. It cramps you on the head, it cramps you on the side, it puts you in a box on wheels... It's a terrible experience. Motorcycles are about opening the field of vision.