Frank Gehry

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.

Your best work is your expression of yourself.

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

For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

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

I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.

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.

The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself. I tell this to my students: It's not about copying me or my logic systems. It's about allowing yourself to be yourself.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

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.

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.