Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.
Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.
I live a healthy lifestyle and I crave healthy food. I love porridge - I have bizarre cravings for it. I love it with brown sugar and bananas, and I'm a huge fan of cinnamon - I put cinnamon on everything. I also have a sweet tooth and I don't like to deprive myself. I think everything in moderation is the key.
My personal life is the same. At the end of the day, this is just a job. I love what I do, and it's a great job. But it's like my alter ego. There's Chris Brown the singer. And there's Christopher Brown, the down-home Tappahannock boy that plays video games and basketball and hangs out.
I think I'm right-brained, incapable of managing my way out of a brown paper bag.
When I was a kid, my dream was to be a farmer and marry Charlie Brown. I wanted to rescue him and make him happy. Besides, he was always lusting after the little redhead girl.
John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.
I threw my 20th birthday party at Brown, and I didn't even have to say to anyone not to put pictures on Facebook. Not a single picture went up. That was when I knew I'd found a solid group of friends, and I felt like I belonged.
The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.
There are no more white linen sofas in my house. We have a rule here: Anything below 36 inches has to be brown or black - the color of chocolate or peanut butter!