Quotes from Frank Gehry

I don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant.

My buildings are all on budget.

Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

You have to build up a credibility before the support comes to you.

When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.

We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

Take what comes your way. Do the best with it. Be responsible as you can and something good will happen.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

Many people put a green button on their collar and feel good, just like a lot of people put an American flag on their lapels and feel patriotic. It's not enough.I'm not dismissing it.

Many people put a green button on their collar and feel good, just like a lot of people put an American flag on their lapels and feel patriotic. It's not enough.

In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures.

I didn't have any interest in doing rich people's homes. I still don't.

I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. 'The client made me do this.' 'The city made me do this.' 'Oh, the budget.' I don't believe that anymore.

I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going.

The game is if the orchestra can hear each other, they play better. If they play better and there's a tangible feeling between the orchestra and the audience, if they feel each other, the audience responds and the orchestra feels it.

If the room is friendly to a relationship between lecturer and audience, you feel everything - the tension, the appreciation. I think the audience feels it too.

This neo-minimalism super cold stuff is weird to me. I need a place where I can come home and take my shoes off.

If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.

I never said I was opposed to the LEED program or to green building - I'm not.

I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

I'm of two minds about doing any interviews these days. It seems a lot of the world is out to play gotcha with me. I guess they always go after people these days. It's sport.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

I was in Peru and visited a building near Lima built by the Incas. It was low in height, with no windows at all, but all the way in the back there was air movement. And I couldn't figure out how they'd done it; it was incredible.