Quotes from Zaha Hadid

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

When I taught, all my best students were women.

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.

You have to be very focused and work very hard, but it is not about working hard without knowing what your aim is!

Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity.

I will always have two regrets. I don't have a presence in London, and I would have liked to have done more work in the Middle East.

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.

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.

Some people really live and work within the same doctrine, the same diagram with the same logic.

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.

As a woman, you're not accessible to every world.

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

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

I don't use the computer. I do sketches, very quickly, often more than 100 on the same formal research.

A brilliant design will always benefit from the input of others.

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

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