Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity.

I don't think people should do things because you know, 'I am turning this age, I must go have a husband.' If you find somebody and it works out then have kids, it's very nice. But if you don't, you don't.

People don't talk to you properly. It's the way they talk to you; they dismiss you. I think it's a combination of me being a woman and a foreigner.

I'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples.

My earliest memory of architecture, I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, was of my aunt building a house in mosul in the north of iraq. The architect was a close friend of my father's and he used to come to our house with the drawings and models. I remember seeing the model in our living room and I think it triggered something, as I was completely intrigued by it.

It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies

The goal posts might shift, but you should have a goal.