“I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and ...” — Frances Mayes Quote

I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.

I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.

I'm just fascinated by houses. In another life, I'd have probably trained as an architect. If I had enough money, I'd collect them like other people collect teapots. I don't know why I love them so much. I'm just very interested in the idea of a house as a metaphor for the way one lives.

In America, people are just so straightforward when they dislike things.

Inherent in architecture, it involves everything in life so that there is absolutely no end to it. By the time you're seventy or eighty, you're still beginning. So, that's the kind of life I've preferred to being the expert at forty and dead, you know.

I was studying architecture at Berkeley when my father passed away in 2007. We knew he had cancer, but we didn't expect it to escalate so rapidly. In my mind, it was like, 'He'll pull through.' When he didn't, I didn't understand. I was 21, and my best friend had died.

My architecture tends to be legible, light and flexible. You can read it. You look at a building, and you can see how it is constructed. I put the structure outside.

The world of sculpture precedes by many years the world of architecture.