Everybody was inspired by the drawings and the wind tunnels and the race cars - but no one wanted to work with me because I had a reputation for being an aerodynamic dictator!

I was 3 years old, and we had a very rich neighbor in Berlin who drove a Mercedes sports car. I remember standing behind this car, admiring the trunk, how nicely shaped it was, for an hour. That shape has never left me - I could design it today!

I'm a very peaceful man. In the '80s, I was the chief designer at Thyssen, one of the biggest companies in Germany. But when they asked me to design armored vehicles, tanks, and submarines, I quit overnight.

The thing is, 75 percent of design today is absolutely outdated. It all has to be redesigned with the materials and knowledge that we now have. We know so much more than what we are doing.

If I had been president, I would have come out and declared: Nothing there, ever! This place stays as it is. We make a big place there where people can pray about the errors we have made that those two towers had to fall.

I consider myself a 3-D philosopher. I am not a designer at all. I studied aerodynamics, I studied philosophy, I studied sculpture. High technology on one side, and on the other side, art.

An architect has to build the building from the inside out, not the outside in!

It took two years of me telling Canon engineers that a camera is a thing between the human hand and the human eye, so it had to have ergonomics on both sides! They got the message, and we did it, and overnight it was the camera of the world. Everyone - Nikon, Yashica, Sony - all copied Colani.

China came from a communist dictatorship of the ugliest kind to become a country which today has a smiling population. Things are getting better and better every day - you can feel it, you can touch it over here!

Look at nature - look at birds, look at fish. Things that look good, work good. People don't get the message of ergonomics.

It is absolutely the central theme in my design philosophy - that life is erotic, period. The female body is one of the most extraordinary designs ever done in this universe.

Well, sex is life. You know, if you don't do it anymore, you can take a spoon and go into the woods and dig yourself a hole and be finished! Eroticism is the driving force behind everything in the world.