Mies van der Rohe's architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it's co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body -- you can't help but be moved.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

There is an unalterable and widening gap between exterior and interior, symbol and content, form and function -a gap which is making the environment more and more inarticulate, impossible to understand and difficult to manipulate.

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

But I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

If you can't take the kitsch, get out of the kitchen.

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases.

Can't you see, we are in a dialogue with the universe?

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is -- certain, even dogmatic -- until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

Europe has been in my bones.

You have to believe in a placebo or it won't work, but if it works, it's obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.

If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts.