Zaha Hadid

“I don't think that everybody in the planet should have a child. I've never had the desire I should have a kid.”

“It's very important for cities all around the world to reinvent themselves, and Glasgow is a good example of that. The Scots are very nice. I don't think they are burdened by their history.”

“When I first came to Guangzhou in 1981, it seemed such a hard and dour place with everyone in Chairman Mao uniforms.”

“What's nice about concrete is that it looks unfinished.”

“People don't talk to you properly. It's the way they talk to you; they dismiss you. I think it's a combination of me being a woman and a foreigner.”

“What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.”

“People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.”

“I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.”

“My father was a politician, and a very important politician, and one of the leaders of the Iraqi Democratic Party, who believed in progress.”

“In Iraq, many of my female friends were architects and professionals with a lot of power during the 1980s while all the men were at war in Iran.”

“I loved London. In the 1970s... it was very exciting, really wild.”

“As a woman, you're not accessible to every world.”

“If you think about making a city that is much more porous, many accessible spaces, that is a political position, because you don't fortify, you open it up so that many people can use it.”

“When I taught, all my best students were women.”

“As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.”

“For many years, I hated nature. As a student, I refused to put a plant anywhere - a living plant, that is. Dead plants were OK.”

“Society has not been set up in a way that allows women to go back to work after taking time off. Many women now have to work as well as do everything at home and no one can do everything. Society needs to find a way of relieving women.”

“Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.”

“My buildings are not particularly expensive. It is not a tin shed. If you want a tinny car, you pay for that.”

“I don't think people should do things because you know, 'I am turning this age, I must go have a husband.' If you find somebody and it works out then have kids, it's very nice. But if you don't, you don't.”