For me, acting is torturous, and it's torturous because you know it's a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, that's beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great - well, that's absolutely torturous.
Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting.
After I began to make some money, my brain-damaged accountant put me in one business after another that went bad. The only one that panned out was a small bank, an old Scottish firm with London offices in Pall Mall. I was a director. We sold out to a larger bank. That was the only successful venture I've had, apart from acting.
Choicelessness brings you to the whole. Choice is always of the part, necessarily so. And then one person goes from one choice to another, becomes a driftwood - from this bank to another bank, from that bank to this bank. This is how you have been moving, down the ages, for so many lives
I've never had a problem with a dumb client. There is no such thing as a bad client. Part of our job is to do good work and get the client to accept it.
When I was very young in London, I had a bank account, which didn't have a great deal in it. I should think at least every three months the bank manager would call me up and threaten to strangle me because I had no money, and I was writing checks.
Each project is torturous and joyful, and it's always an inspiration.
Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.
Think about the blouse you want to wear for that big meeting with your boss, or the skirt you want to reserve for a client dinner. Once you've pinpointed the item that you'll feel good in, the other pieces will fall into place.
No client ever had money enough to bribe my conscience or to stop its utterance against wrong, and oppression. My conscience is my own - my creators - not man's. I shall never sink the rights of mankind to the malice, wrong, or avarice of another's wishes, though those wishes come to me in the relation of client and attorney.
In London, before I set out, I had paid one shilling; another was now demanded, so that upon the whole, from London to Richmond, the passage in the stage costs just two shillings.
I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I have a previous engagement with another client; successful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach.
A lawyer once told a jury that the person his client stood accused of having killed was about to walk through the courtroom door. When the jurors looked startled, the lawyer asserted that if those jurors had wondered, even for one second that the victim might appear, that belief constituted enough reasonable doubt for them to find his client innocent.
When the outcome of a meeting is to have another meeting, it has been a lousy meeting.
I was doing a campaign once for a manufacturer, and I couldn't think of an ideas, and I was kind of desperate about it. The night before I had to show something to my client I had a dream, an interesting dream. I woke up and for once in my life I wrote it down and went back to sleep Next morning I went to the office and had that dream out into a TV commercial which is still running thirty years after and which has made that particular product the leader in its field.
When I came here I moved to London and I was meeting so many new people and had to speak only in English, which is not my native language.