Quotes from Philip Johnson

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

You cannot not know history.

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

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

ARCHITECTURE, n The art of how to waste space.

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

You're going to change the world? Well, go ahead and try. You'll give it up at a certain point and change yourself instead.

I'm a chameleon, so changeable. I see myself as a gadfly and a questioner.

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

We all see the world differently. And thank God for that. Otherwise, what a boring world this would be.

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.

From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence.

There's only one reason for my whole life, and that's art. Nothing else counts; nothing else gives me pleasure; nothing else gives me satisfaction.

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

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

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?

I used to think that each phase of life was the end. But now that my view on life is more or less fixed, I believe that change is a great thing. In fact, it's the only real absolute in the world.

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.

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.

In our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life

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.

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.