myself

I believe the reason for my early independence is sport, through which I learnt at an early stage to take care of myself and be disciplined.

Only children are weird. The only children I know, including myself, are either superweird or very talented and special or a mix of the two. I think there was always a certain independence and loneliness - I had a lot of imaginary friends as a kid.

I have grown up alone. I've taken care of myself. I worked, earned money and was independent at 18.

I do not belong to any religion. Everything is between God and myself.

I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.

First and foremost, Scotland is my home, and I do consider myself Scottish, but I also feel very British, and I hope that Scotland stays within the Union. I have a real concern about independence.

I think that my parents' divorce gave me a very strong sense of self-reliance and independence. I realised that I needed to make sure I could support myself because you don't know what's going to happen in the future.

The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.

I guess you'd call me an independent, since I've never identified myself with one party or another in politics. I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves, no matter what the party label.

I always showed myself in the face of day, asserting the liberty and independence of my country, while some others, like owls, courted concealment and were too much afraid of losing their roosts to leave them for such a cause.

Architecture adds dimensions to my life that would be impossible to acquire if I retired. The beautiful thing about architecture is that every project is brand new. I am forced to renew myself with every project. Isn't that wonderful?

I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.

Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.

For my first apartment, when I was first married, I went to the lumberyard and bought stuff and made couches. My then-wife made cushions. I was really very interested in furniture. I was in school for architecture, but I had to live, and making furniture was different from designing buildings, which I couldn't do for myself.

I remember coming back to the U.K. after spending five months in Charlotte for 'Homeland,' and I just found myself just wandering around London. There's nothing like it - the buildings, the architecture, the sense of history, the sense of culture - there really is nothing like it.

It is good to learn from the ancients. I'm a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.

As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.

Family, work, familiarity. Listen, if I had a magic wand and I could make myself really be happy, I'd zap me onto a farm. And I know nothing about farming.