If I do my job well, then God will smile on my offspring and on their offspring. I'm sure my father is seeing a blessing in me.

Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate.

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.

Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.

There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.

I love flying; I love aircraft, and you could say I've had a love affair with flight since I was a child. I travel a huge amount. I use airports, and as a pilot, I've flown in and out of airports thousands of times, so really, I have a fairly broad perspective.

As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.

The most amazing lesson in aerodynamics I ever had was the day I climbed a thermal in a glider at the same time as an eagle. I witnessed, close up, effortlessness and lightness combined with strength, precision and determination.

I travel continuously, and I see many cities, but there is nowhere like London.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.

I describe the design process as like the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see is the long haul: all the endless auditing and things like that.

Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.

The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

I didn't think; I experimented.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

Every dogma has its day.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

Painting and writing are solitary arts.

There is a kind of beauty in imperfection.

You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward.

I saw Tequila Sunrise as a romantic picture with complex, bigger than life characters.

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

Billions of people have seen and been influenced by movies in the short history of this industry.

Dad, wherever you are, you are gone but you will never be forgotten.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

A smile is the universal welcome.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.

This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art.

Light in Nature creates the movement of colors.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife; she has thought much worse things about you.