Famous quotes by Architects

"The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen"

"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters"

"A good book written for children can be read by adults"

"People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of"

"One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times"

"It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean"

"I think really good books can be read by anybody"

"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth"

"Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all"

"In my opinion, further consideration of those views will help us find a way out of the current impasse, and reveal to us the kinds of buildings and cities required by the informational society"

"But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance"

"I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they're learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting"

"I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea"

"When you're very young and you learn something - a fact, a piece of information, whatever - it doesn't connect to anything"

"There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction"

"The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way"

"I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that's about it"

"Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age"

"An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site"

"Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed"

"A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it"

"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger"

"Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances"

"The space within becomes the reality of the building"

"The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope"

"The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings"

"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization"

"The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes"

"The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it"

"The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind"