I like to be buttoned onto tradition. The thing is to improve it, twist it and mold it; to make something new of it; not to deny it. The riches of history can be plucked at any point.
Interpretation
Tradition should be embraced and enhanced rather than rejected.
In this quote, Philip Johnson emphasizes the importance of tradition in creative endeavors. He suggests that one should not simply adhere to tradition but instead take it as a foundation to innovate and create something new, thereby celebrating the richness of history while contributing to its evolution.
In practice
In a speech about modern art, you could use this quote to highlight the value of tradition in artistic innovation.
Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.
I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty, so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs - at the Parthenon, at Chartres Cathedral.
The future of architecture is culture.
Architecture is art, nothing else.
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.
The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.
Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities.
We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
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