Explore Quotes by Frank Gehry

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.

Creativity is about play and a kind of willingness to go with your intuition. It's crucial to an artist. If you know where you are going and what you are going to do, why do it? I think I learned that from the artists, from my grandmother, from all the creative people I've spent time with over the years.

My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies.

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 think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

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 game is if the orchestra can hear each other, they play better. If they play better and there's a tangible feeling between the orchestra and the audience, if they feel each other, the audience responds and the orchestra feels it.

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.

A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.

On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder.

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.

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.

One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

My buildings are all on budget.

I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.

My father probably - he had flashes of creativity - he used to do store windows for fruit stores that he worked in and stuff.

I refuse to work unless I get paid, so I don't get a lot of work sometimes.

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.

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