Philip Johnson

“Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.”

“I always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.”

“You cannot not know history.”

“If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.”

“Anybody can build a building, putting some doors into it, but how many times have you been in a building that moves you to tears the way Beethoven's 'Eighth' does?”

“The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.”

“I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.”

“I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.”

“Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.”

“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.”

“I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?”

“I'm about four skyscrapers behind.”

“Glibness will get your anywhere.”

“There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.”

“To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.”

“Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.”

“I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.”

“I get between nine and ten hours of sleep. Go to bed at 8:30 and get up at 6:00 or 6:30 if I oversleep.”

“Architecture is the art of how to waste space.”

“Architecture is art, nothing else.”