Renzo Piano

"In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music."

"Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years."

"I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family."

"I don't like the idea that the first preparation when you start to design your building has to put your label. I think this is not fair. It's not fair to the building or to the people, to the client, because every building tells a different story."

"I don't want to be romantic, but one of the most important things is to have happy buildings... it's like having a family with a lot of children."

"In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years."

"London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design."

"The difference between a builder and an architect is that an architect also cares about desire, about dreams."

"When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it."