Quotes from Oscar Niemeyer

I am a Brazilian before I am an architect. I cannot separate the two.

I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

The challenge of a cathedral is very good for architectural inventiveness.

When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since.

My architecture is easy to understand. And enjoy. I hope it also is hard to forget.

Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, even if only for an instant.

Camus says in 'The Stranger' that reason is the enemy of imagination. Sometimes you have to put reason aside and make something beautiful.

It is not with architecture that one can disseminate any political ideology.

Life is more important than architecture.

We need to feel that life is important; we need that fantasy so we can live a little better.

I like talking to priests, to Catholics. Everyone has their beliefs.

The artistic capability of reinforced concrete is so fantastic - that is the way to go.

Form follows beauty.

It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.

Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.

I was attracted by the curve — the liberated, sensual curve suggested by the possibilities of new technology yet so often recalled in venerable old baroque churches.

Architecture does not change anything. It's always on the side of the wealthy. The important thing is to believe that it can make life better.

When students leave college, they are like children who know nothing about the problems of life, and don't have a political stance.

What attracts me are free and sensual curves. The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love.

Sometimes I lose a whole morning waiting on journalists and other people who look for me. But I always find some time for reading, talking to my friends and feeling what is happening in this world.

Of course, I have given my engineers some headaches over the years, but they go with me. I have always wanted my buildings to be as light as possible, to touch the ground gently, to swoop and soar, and to surprise.

Curves are the essence of my work because they are the essence of Brazil, pure and simple.

Architecture is invention.

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.