Art is the collaboration between God and the artist and the less the artist does the better.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock a flower the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two it's bad art.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist and the less the artist does the better.

Without this spirit Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism I use architecture to reconcile the two.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

In any architecture there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have because when you're talking about building a house you're talking about dreams.

Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward and you will have the truth about him.

The anger that appears to be building up between the sexes becomes more virulent with every day that passes. And far from women taking the blame... the fact is that men are invariably portrayed as the bad guys. Being a good man is like being a good Nazi.