Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society f...
[last lines] Japanese newscaster: Susan Jones, who was wounded in a terrorist attack in Morocco, was discharged from a Casablanca hospital this morning, local time. The American people finally have a happy ending, after five days of frantic phone cal...
The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of...
The most beautiful thing that I learned, I learned from my kids. They were eight and ten - and they were playing with Moroccan kids in these humble villages, and they were playing with the Japanese kids... because they haven't built those walls that ...
At times, I do Tabata, a high-intensity Japanese training regimen, in which I must do 20 seconds of a specific body part with 10 seconds of rest. This must be done eight times within four minutes. Your heart rate shoots through the roof, but you burn...
I have always appreciated designers who dare to reinterpret fabrics and proportions, so I follow the Japanese and Belgian designers. The pieces are so animated. When they lie still, they are one thing, but once you stand them up or wear them, they be...
It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equa...
Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression...
In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff. I liked cars and architecture, and things that cost money. I wanted to not swing a hammer, and make money... and not do stuff that was dirt...
When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I...
I like things that are kind of eclectic, when one thing doesn't go with another. That's why I love Rome. The town itself is that way. It's where Fascist architecture meets classic Renaissance, where the ancient bangs up against the contemporary. It h...
My university degree is in art and, yes, I do a lot of drawing for all my books. I have a big drafting table set up in a spare bedroom and I cover it with maps and house plans and sketches that I use in the books. Also, I truly love architecture, so ...
You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were...
For me, it does not 'miss' if (the Potteries Thinkbelt study) goes into the archive, not as an example of how railway carriages can be used for teaching, but as one of the most powerful question marks ever placed against the architecture of universit...
Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces life The Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.
I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of water drops in the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear becomes a cavity sculpted in the interi...
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can...
Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings - shelt...
George: You're a great architect, and a miserable human being. [Proceeds to smash one of his architectural models to bits] Bryan Burke: [Angrily, holding the shattered model in his hands] You're not even a fucking architect, and you're a miserable hu...
The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not fa...
