“I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.”

“To me, the American Dream is being able to follow your own personal calling. To be able to do what you want to do is incredible freedom.”

“How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It's more evident now.”

“I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.”

“You should be having more fun in high school, exploring things because you want to explore them and learning because you love learning-not worrying about competition.”

“I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.”

“Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.”

“I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.”

“I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.”

“Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.”

“I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.”