Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.

The remark crystallizes Wright’s cultivated self-image: unapologetically confident, even combative, yet insisting that his confidence is at least sincere. By contrasting “honest arrogance” with “hypocritical humility,” he reframes a common moral expectation—modesty—as potentially performative, and recasts pride as a kind of integrity when it matches one’s genuine self-assessment. The second sentence (“have seen no reason to change”) turns the statement into a retrospective justification: his career-long controversies, public feuds, and iconoclastic designs are presented as evidence that forthright self-belief served him better than social deference. It also functions as a defense against critics who read his certainty as vanity.