Zaha Hadid

My friendships are very important to me.

I have always appreciated designers who dare to reinterpret fabrics and proportions, so I follow the Japanese and Belgian designers. The pieces are so animated. When they lie still, they are one thing, but once you stand them up or wear them, they become something else.

I'm into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment - like music, literature, and art.

I have been interested in fashion since I was a kid. Then I lived in London, where it was more about costume and a personal statement of who you are than about fashion.

I loved London. In the 1970s... it was very exciting, really wild.

When you are overworked and exhausted, there is a sense of kind of delirium and that's why I think architects do all-nighters and they kind of do those deadlines. For four days I remember doing four nights in one row with no sleep. I mean nobody, unless you are crazy, would do that, but you are totally focused on the project.

When I taught, all my best students were women.

What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.

I think that the training of architects allows you to see what will happen ten years ahead of time, or twenty. It's not guessing, it's not intuitive, it's based on research - and we may be wrong.

I think it's good if areas get upgraded and gentrified, as long as the people who always lived there can stay. But they get pushed out to some place.

Life in the Middle East is quite different from other places.

Like men, women have to be diligent and work hard.

Society has not been set up in a way that allows women to go back to work after taking time off. Many women now have to work as well as do everything at home and no one can do everything. Society needs to find a way of relieving women.

My buildings are not particularly expensive. It is not a tin shed. If you want a tinny car, you pay for that.

Good education is so important. We do need to look at the way people are taught. It not just about qualifications to get a job. It's about being educated.

I like music. Country, hip-hop, R&B, sometimes classical.

I don't think I am that tough, actually. Well, tough in the sense that I don't take any rubbish, and that doesn't make me very popular, frankly. I mean, because some people say something to me, and I just tell them off. I mean, why should I put up with it?

Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.

Contrary to popular view, I've never been patronized in the Middle East. Men maybe treat women differently, but they do not treat them with disrespect. They don't hate women. It's a very different kind of mentality.

I don't think people should do things because you know, 'I am turning this age, I must go have a husband.' If you find somebody and it works out then have kids, it's very nice. But if you don't, you don't.

Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time.

Of course, my family helped me, my brothers helped me, but after I set up my own office I had to really help myself. Some people seem to think I had an oil well in my garden! It's a nice idea but not true.

I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.

Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.

The commission process in America and England is different. In America, they do it through an interview process, and it's really based on whether they like you or not. I mean, it's nothing to do with whether you do the best scheme or the worst scheme.

My father was a socialist, so he would have thought that I shouldn't be a dame.

People don't talk to you properly. It's the way they talk to you; they dismiss you. I think it's a combination of me being a woman and a foreigner.

Women are always told, 'You're not going to make it, its too difficult, you can't do that, don't enter this competition, you'll never win it,' - they need confidence in themselves and people around them to help them to get on.

I am equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.

When I was growing up in Iraq, there was an unbroken belief in progress and a great sense of optimism. It was a moment of nation building.

I used to not like being called a 'woman architect': I'm an architect, not just a woman architect. Guys used to tap me on the head and say, 'You are okay for a girl.' But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don't mind that at all.

I can't focus when there's too many things around. Whenever I used to go to the office, I used to always say, 'Tidy up.'

People in power, they're so used to people kind of playing up to them.

I am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it.

In hospital, people should be able to have time to themselves.

You don't always have to show art in what's called a white box; you can have a kind of complexity within an exhibit which actually respects the art as well.

The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.

I made a decision when I was in school that I'd have a lot of male friends.

Men think a woman should not have an opinion.

Being Iraqi taught me to be very cautious.

For many years, I hated nature. As a student, I refused to put a plant anywhere - a living plant, that is. Dead plants were OK.

Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for society.

Wherever I am in the world, my perfect day begins with waking up and heading to the beach or the pool or somewhere I can be semi-comatose. I just wake up and go to the sun.

It's very important for cities all around the world to reinvent themselves, and Glasgow is a good example of that. The Scots are very nice. I don't think they are burdened by their history.

I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.

My father was a politician, and a very important politician, and one of the leaders of the Iraqi Democratic Party, who believed in progress.

My generation were all careerists.

I have always appreciated those who dare to experiment with materials and proportions.

I am sure that as a woman I can do a very good skyscraper.

I'm a pushover. I make allowances for people if I like them.