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I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it. Since being here, I have read the accounts of several travellers, and in many cases the devotional rhapsodies - the ecstacies of awe and reverence - in which they indulge, strike me as forced and affected.

Religious symbols should be visible in public space, in a dignified and non-provocative manner. Christmas trees here, Jewish menorahs there and, further along, a minaret - these symbols represent human life in all its diversity.

It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.

When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.

The only way we'll know where we're going is to look at the past and to remember who we were through ceremonies and rituals.

When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.

Art used to be made in the name of faith. We made cathedrals, we made stained-glass windows, we made murals.

I saw a photo of a Christian Lacroix couture dress when I was in my teens and decided right then that that's how I wanted to look on my wedding day. In my mind, that's what angels looked like.

I noticed that people were craving a way of reinterpreting tradition and of being Jewish without joining a synagogue.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.