Quotes from Frank Gehry

I work from the inside out.

Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.

Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.

Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.

With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.

The thing is, I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work.

I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.

Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

In the art world Robert Rauschenberg had been combining common materials that people thought was art and beautiful, and it was. If he could do that, I could emulate him.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.

I don't make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture.

When I went to Harvard and studied planning, I found I didn't have the skills or the strength to become the kind of public person who could go out and lobby government agencies.

A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.

And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.

There is stuff I would have liked to have done. But there are no sour grapes.

Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

I don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull.

Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.

I'm going to design the container and interior spaces. You bring your own stuff to it and make it your own.

Generally people are more impressed with the services and the comfort issues than the design.

If the general public demanded better, they'd get better, because the market­place responds to the public's needs and desires.

It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.