We're not just social animals in the conventional way that people think. It's not just a bunch of us who hang out together. We have a very specific pattern of ties, and they have a particular shape and structure that is encoded in our genes. It means...
When experiencing a work of art, a curious exchange takes place; the work projects its aura, and we project our own emotions and precepts on the work. The melancholy in Michelangelo's architecture is fundamentally the viewer's sense of his/her own me...
Much protective self-criticism stems from growing up around people who wouldn't or couldn't love you, and it's likely they still can't or won't. In general, however, the more you let go of the tedious delusion of your own unattractiveness, the easier...
Clarence Anglin: What movie is playing this week? John Anglin: Some cowboy piece of shit. [goes into Italian-American voice] John Anglin: 'ey, least dey could show was a gangsta movie! [laughs] Frank Morris: I may have found a way out of here. [the g...
I always tend to think, even in residential projects, about what a space is being asked to do - where is it located, what are the circumstances, where can I attack the problem, so to speak. How can you create a narrative for people moving through it?...
I don't think we should stop emphasizing race because I think, you know, race is still very, very important, and we have to recognize that and continue to introduce programs to address racial inequities. But we have to widen our vision and also addre...
In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which...
The problem with a plan is that you fill up the blank page of a new day with a ' ' list before you get there. And if you're not careful there's no room for anything else. A plan, especially a very focused one, narrows down the possibilies of the futu...
The keys to liberation are universal and essentially simple: disengage from all the stories you've been telling yourself about life and who you are or should be as you negotiate your way through, and all at once you know yourself as divine, all-power...
We depend on computers when we ourselves haven't mastered the principles behind what we are asking computers to design. Glenn Murcutt - A Singular Architectural Practice page 16
On the other side of St John’s house is a fake egg timer who can’t maintain an erection. He shares the property with a glossy beef burger called Tom, who has been painted by a seven year old magistrate in order to be entered for this year’s Mis...
Oh yeah, well I suddenly realises that she’d only been with my boyfriend at the Co-op Christmas do when I were eighteen. So I grabs her head and I stuck it through a display of them Muller’s rices and I told her. That’s for shagging Kevin Coope...
Eunice had deposited St John upon the balcony of the first-floor apartment of former Liberal MP, The Rt. Hon. Leonard Cossins, the disgraced Lord Mayor of Mitchell-Baines who had been removed from office having been caught administering counterfeit b...
I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evel...
As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courag...
The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere'S laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our foun...
It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s ...
The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so su...
This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died—what I call your ‘spiritual security’—knowing that your family wil...
So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to...
