I've finally learnt how to say 'No comment'. To appear in the tabloids is a real learning curve and a steep one at that. You had better learn quick or you get burnt.

May I say finally that I have no illusions of grandeur quite to the contrary I am very humble in my knowledge that through forty years of my life my life has been an open book of service to my fellow architects and for the public good.

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

It's a great excuse and luxury having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are you come out and hope that no one runs away.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

I saw the president make the tough calls in the Situation Room - and today our troops in Iraq have finally come home so America can do some nation building here at home. That was the change that we believed in. That was the change we fought for. That was the change President Obama delivered.

And it took me since I was 17 and left home running from God to now as a 30-year-old man when I honestly feel like I've come full circle and my heart's finally in the right place.