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.
I think 'accessible' just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry.
There must be a story within him/her that wants to come out. That's the reason why 'Dil Chahta Hai,' 'Lagaan,' and 'Rang De Basanti' worked so well: Ashutosh, Farhan, and Rakesh had a story inside them. It's very important that the director should have the fire in the belly to tell the story.
I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.
One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.
I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.
I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: ‘Excuse me, it was all a dream,’ and by that time I may have found one who will say: ‘Not at all, it was true, absolutely true.’
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