Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.

If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.

Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone elses hands.

There is no plateau of resting or stabilising. Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective, because it means you are interested in articulating the evolution, and therefore the potential change, the potential redefinition.