Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.

I'm interested in conflict and confrontation.

In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.

I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?

For me, pop culture is very fluid: it's music, it's movies, it's books, it's art, it's tech, it's so many things - and as marketing and brand advocates, we should be able to to take products and services and match them to what's happening in pop culture.

As an actor on a film, you have no control over the final product - your job is to make a director's vision come true. So, you need to have total faith in them and add your own creativity and opinions and energy, but you have to really give over responsibility, and sometimes that can feel terrifying.

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'