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.

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

When you're 20, you think the whole world is talented, but whenyou get older, you realize the opposite is true.

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 always want to encourage young artists. As the budgets get smaller, that might provide an opening for younger artists and more experimentation. Budgets had gotten quite large for art, as they had for architecture. I'm not going to cut back. The minute someone walks through my door, I go, "That's my thing and you got to let me do it."

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.

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.