"Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don't want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope—not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feathers? Why? You must tell me, because I’ve never been able to understand it."

"You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why—knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way—why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met."

"What do you want? Perfection?" "—or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing." "That doesn’t make sense." "I take the only desire one can permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah. Freedom." "You call that freedom?" "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing."

"As a matter of fact, one can feel some respect for people when they suffer. They have a certain dignity. But have you ever looked at them when they're enjoying themselves? That's when you see the truth."

"If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them—just so they'll let you keep it."

"A house can have integrity, just like a person; and just as seldom."

"[…] the only way in which we can have any law at all is to have as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion. There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on any terms except those he chooses to set. There is no conceivable law to prevent him from setting them—just as there is none to force his employer to accept them. The freedom to agree or disagree is the foundation of our kind of society—and the freedom to strike is a part of it."

"Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you, everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable—and unimportant?" "No."

"It was not necessary to design buildings any longer, only to photograph them; the architect with the best library was the best architect. […] Henry Cameron had nothing to offer against this; nothing but a faith he held merely because it was his own. He had nobody to quote and nothing of importance to say. He said only that the form of a building must follow its function; that the structure of a building is the key to its beauty; that new methods of construction demand new forms; that he wished to build as he wished and for that reason only. […] Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost."

"How do you always manage to decide?" "How can you let others decide for you?"

"If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?"

"I don't intend to build in order to have clients; I intend to have clients in order to build."

"But you see, I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one."

"Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important—what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right—so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic—and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand."

"Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it."

"Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture?" He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon. "That," said the Dean, "is the Parthenon!" "So it is." "I haven't the time to waste on silly questions." "All right, then." Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. "Shall I tell you what's rotten about it?" "It’s the Parthenon!" said the Dean. "Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon." The ruler struck the glass over the picture. "Look, " said Roark. "The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in the wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?"

"Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?"

"Howard Roark laughed."

"The deluded little rube who thought he could ever earn enough, know enough, own enough, run fast enough, hide well enough. Fuck enough."

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

"The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such a projection of life as we know it."

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create."

"When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option."

"People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become."

"We live and die and anything else is just delusion."

"Language... was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world."

"Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple."

"Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be."

"You tell me, what does it get you if you can square root a triangle and then some terrorist shoots you in the head?"

"If you're ever in a big hotel lobby, and they start to play 'The Blue Danube Waltz,' get the hell out. Don't think, run."

"The glue and resin smell in new cars is formaldehyde, she'd tell him, the same thing they use to preserve dead bodies."

"The diseases a mother can pass to her baby are : Toxoplasmosis, Other (meaning syphilis and HIV), Rubella, Cytomegalovirus, and Herpes. It helps if you can picture a mother passing the torch to her baby."

"A little muscle twitch means rabies, means muscle cramps, thrist, confusion, and drooling, followed by seizures, coma, death. Acne means ovarian cysts. Feeling a little tired means tuberculosis. Bloodshot eyes mean meningitis. Drowsiness is the first sign of typhoid. Those floaters you see cross your eyes on sunny days, they mean your retina is detaching. You're going blind."

"This is the world we live in. I've been there, taken the MCAT. The Medical College Admission Test. I went to the USC School of Medicine long enough to know that a mole is never just a mole. That a simple headache means brain tumors, means double vision, numbness, vomiting followed by seizures, drowsiness, death."

""The way to remember the symptoms of melanoma is the letters ABCD."

"The world won't end with a whimper or a bang, but with a discreet, tasteful announcement: 'Bill Rivervale, phone call holding, line two.' Then nothing."

"So if you think this is going to save you..."

"Just keep asking yourself: 'What would Jesus NOT do?'"

"A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death."

"How can it be prostitution if all the women were dead?"

"By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself."

"We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces."

"The magic of sex is it's acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there's never a storage problem."

"Every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married"

"Art never comes from happiness"

"Nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it."

"The magic of sexual addiction is you don't ever feel hungry or tired or bored or lonely."

"All women have to do is get naked, and we give them all our money. I mean, why are we such slaves?"

"In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure."

"It's the martyrdom of Saint Me."