All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Their houses are all built in the shape of tents, with very high chimneys.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

Men shut their doors against a setting sun.

I call architecture frozen music.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule.