Jane Smiley Quotes

I live in a loft in a building I designed, but for my dream house I'd get Frank Gehry, just to see what he'd do.

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.

Frank Gehry designs buildings that make other architects half his age (he's 78) gasp with envy. Neotony is what makes him lace up his skates and whirl around the ice rink, while visionary buildings come to life and dance in his head.

What if you're Gaudi and you know you're the best architect and everyone is saying that you're saying you're the best architect the wrong way?

Kurosawa was one of film's true greats. His ability to transform a vision into a powerful work of art is unparalleled.

People ask me if I'm an artist or an architect. But I think they're the same.

Experimental architecture by its very nature is more prone to the depredations of time and natural elements than buildings made from conventional materials through traditional methods. Avant-garde architects often simply do not know how the products of their imagination will perform when implemented, especially if untested components are involved.

Creative vision creates art" - he motioned around the gallery - "that shows the rest of the world a new angle. That's beautiful thing." "Or some sort of madness", she said.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.

An artist is a prophet and seer, not a paint craftsman or design maker, or reporter or entertainer... the artist has the superiorly searching perception with which that world outside of man's contamination can be penetrated and the truth drawn out from it.

A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.

My weakness ... is architecture. I think of my work as ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body.

My definition of an artist is anyone who's ahead of his time and behind on his rent.

Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

If Picasso walked into Disney looking for a job, they would throw him out on the street. Couldn't draw good enough.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.

Shakespeare - The nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God.

Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

We are devastated to learn of the death of Alexander McQueen, one of the greatest talents of his generation. He brought a uniquely British sense of daring and aesthetic fearlessness to the global stage of fashion. In such a short career, Alexander McQueen's influence was astonishing - from street style, to music culture and the world's museums. His passing marks an insurmountable loss.

The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.

I just want it to look like nothing else in the world. And it should be surrounded by a train.