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

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

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.

I love designing at the moment, I’m so happy with my work.

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

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‚crash‘ when we tried to use them.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

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.

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

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

I call architecture frozen music.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn’t be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

The artist in me cries out for design.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I’ve got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen.

Black-and-white always looks modern, whatever that word means.

Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

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.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

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

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

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

The key to making things affordable is design and technology improvements, as well as scale.

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

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.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

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

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.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

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.

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.

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

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.