“My office, which has always been more or less the same, is a big undifferentiated room. I sit in one place in the room, in the same relationship to the rest of the room as everybody else. There is no visual hierarchy. I think it may have to do with the fact that when I was a kid my family lived in a three-roomed apartment. The family would spend its evenings in the living room. My mother would knit at one end, my father would read the paper and listen to the radio, my sister was at her desk, and I was at the other end doing my homework. I became accustomed to the lack of privacy and got used to working in a place where a lot of things were going on.”

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“In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, ‘Prove it.’ He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.”

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