Frank Gehry

You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.

A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.

My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies.

A lot of people don't get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it's important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.

I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

The best advice I've received is to be yourself. The best artists do that.

Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.

I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. 'The client made me do this.' 'The city made me do this.' 'Oh, the budget.' I don't believe that anymore.

I don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.