In its most limited sense modern art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

There is a lot of interest in the arts music theatre filmmaking engineering architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.

After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture not only in advanced technology allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.

In my experience if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg it's modern architecture.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

Yet for my part deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

Until the Eighties Oslo was a rather boring town but it's changed a lot and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.

Without this spirit Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism I use architecture to reconcile the two.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

I could have been an architect but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.

Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.

And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity it's like a set in a movie.

A book is sent out into the world and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible Homer Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

In the modern media age we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre everything is so advertised so trailed that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere turning its back on the political realm.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.