Quotes About Urban

New York, it's in your face. In Washington, it's in your back.

Shouldn't a real city have at least one building with an elevator?

I'm amazed now whenever I go back to London. I'm like, 'Wow. I used to kind of swing up these streets when I knew how this machine worked.' And then when you don't, you lose that. You need to get your license back. I do know how to plant a garden and keep chickens, but I don't know how to do much else.

I don't read a ton of fiction, but Tom Wolfe's death got me to pick up 'The Bonfire of the Vanities.' I'm a slow reader, but wow - I ended up devouring it in about six days. I'm fascinated with that period, the '80s, when the country was turning around but it seemed like New York and other cities were just hopelessly lost.

I think New York City is a lot more European than the rest of America; it's much easier for an English person to wrap their head around it.

I lived in an apartment near Wrigley Field.

Wrigley Field was built and designed at a time when people got to the ballpark by trolley, train, and horse cart.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice - anything just to get a paper bag. And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

Insecurities and missteps can plague writers and artists who come from rural places. We worry that our provincial life experiences won't gain the approval of urban curators, so we assimilate ourselves to other, more sophisticated voices.

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.

Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.

Graffiti is linear, and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls.

Badaud. Tous les Parisiens sont des badauds quoique sur dix habitants de Paris il y ait neuf provinciaux. À Paris on ne travaille pas.

And each day a friendly intercourse was established between the working-women of the pavement and the idlers of the boarding school.

Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house—a dank savor rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.

Build an entire city in order to make love there with only one girl for few days.

I am a walking, talking Bombay. … I loved that city then and I love it today.

The cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops.

One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing.

From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came

Sheehan's Pool Room, which adorns one of the lesser alleys in the heart of Chicago's stockyard district, is not a nice place. Its air, freighted with a thousand odours such as Coleridge may have found at Cologne, too seldom knows the purifying rays of the sun; but fights for space with the acrid fumes of unnumbered cheap cigars and cigarettes which dangle from the coarse lips of unnumbered human animals that haunt the place day and night.