I hope America can also be the cultural leader of the world and use this frontier spirit to lead and show others that we need courage to go places where we have not gone before.

I think being a wealthy member of the establishment is the antithesis of cool. Being a countercultural revolutionary is cool. So to the extent that you've made a billion dollars you've probably become uncool.

Sydney in the 1960s wasn't the exuberant multicultural metropolis it is today. Out in the city's western reaches days passed in a sun-struck stupor. In the evenings families gathered on their verandas waiting for the 'southerly buster' - the thunderstorm that would break the heat and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep.

I think fashion is a lot of fun. I love clothes. More than fashion or brand labels I love design. I love the thought that people put into clothes. I love when clothes make cultural statements and I think personal style is really cool. I also freely recognize that fashion should be a hobby.

If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies in America it is an insistence on preventing failures of communication.

Being a good Hans Haacke student part of his influence on me is that there's no difference between a gallery show and a film - or even an ad and a T-shirt-in terms of cultural legitimacy. They're just different contexts in which to have some sort of communication.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

In America we no longer have an institutionalized organized way of calling business to task - of taking them to account for what they've done - and this is especially true in the cultural realm.

Perhaps the most effective way to describe the approach a brand must take is to think of themselves as social cartographers. By that I mean that brands must simultaneously inspire engage and maintain a series of conversations taking place within certain cultural landscape specific to their business goal.

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sing about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. To me it was meaningless. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sings about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

I always have one or two sometimes more Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead respect for burial sites.

I went to England in the '70s and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.

I feel however that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

On July 18 we will mark the 12th anniversary of the senseless loss of 85 lives in the bombing of the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires Argentina.