I know it is a somewhat delicate matter to refuse a gift, but in this case the statue is so atrocious that every endeavour should be made to keep it out of the church.
There was this enormous burst of sculptural creative juice in the nineteenth century, and all that stuff is just so decorative. Even in pieces cast from a mold, you get a more sensuous, handmade, individual sense from it.
Sometimes I have to accept a job I don't really want. Hardly anybody comes up to you with a commission; it's all competitions these days.
A building is hard to judge. It takes many years to find out whether it works. It's not as simple as asking the people in the office whether they like it.
Washington is the only city in the world where you can go to a black-tie dinner and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference.
When I went to college, I thought I was going to become a professional musician. I was a French horn player, so I went to Yale to study with a very unusual French horn player.
I always say, 'What if you had to sell the house tomorrow?' And if it's too idiosyncratic, someone won't buy it and then it's a bad house.
Why can I write 'South' with some assurance that you'll know I mean Richmond and don't mean Phoenix? What is it that the South's boundaries enclose?
Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.
Often, architects work too hard trying to make their buildings look different. It's like we're actors let loose on a stage, all speaking our parts at the same time in our own private languages without an audience.
[after Schaffer kills a German with a knife] Major John Smith: That was quick. Lt. Morris Schaffer: Fear lent him wings, as the saying goes.
Lt. Morris Schaffer: There's a stop and start button. [for the cable car] Major John Smith: See if you can make the motor work.
It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics,...
I suggest Substituting Inedible Nurturance, or SIN. Don't replace overeating with virtuous work or exercise; instead, make a list of things you love, from watching TV to hanging out with favorite people.
People sort of imagine Chris Morris and me sitting somewhere dark, with dripping taps and chilling background music. In fact, we like to sit on his roof in the sunshine - and there's an endless amount of just sitting there, going, 'So, erm, er, what ...
The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.
The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.
We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.
Beware of addictive medicines. Everything in moderation. This applies particularly to the Internet and your sofa. The physical world is ultimately the source of all inspiration. Which is to say, if all else fails: take a bike ride.
Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.
In the first instance, therefore, global terrorism created a kind of global community sharing a common fate, something we had previously considered impossible.
