FRANK GEHRY

My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I'm bonkers about that, but other than that, I don't spend money on myself.

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

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.

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 never said I was opposed to the LEED program or to green building - I'm not.

If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.

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

I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client's needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for.

I promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80.

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.

I don't make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture.

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 have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

The fact is I'm an opportunist. I'll take materials around me, materials on my table, and work with them as I'm searching for an idea that works.

When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

This neo-minimalism super cold stuff is weird to me. I need a place where I can come home and take my shoes off.

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.

And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.

When I went to Harvard and studied planning, I found I didn't have the skills or the strength to become the kind of public person who could go out and lobby government agencies.

Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.

I used to sketch - that's the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don't do it much.

I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.

Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.