Quotes About Urban

As we say in the hood, I'm a stoop kid.

I used to build lofts in SoHo back when there was nothing there. I had a stoop on West Broadway between Prince and Spring. My partner and I would sit there, eat dinner, and watch the world go by.

I love the South Bank: every era of architecture is there, and you can stop, look, and listen.

I've run into more people walking in L.A. than if I drove. Because you stand out so much if you walk. People from my past have stopped their cars and said, 'Hey!' But if I was in a car, they never would've seen me.

It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan.

When my car broke down in L.A., nobody stopped. They just kept whizzing by.

I have an incredible sense of direction, but London is confusing. It's a circle, but then it stops being a circle.

I see a future where getting to work or to school or to the store does not have to cause pollution.

I love New York. I can walk half a block and I'm at the grocery store. I don't have to drive anywhere.

I love shopping in New York just because you walk around and find a little store you've never saw before, and you're like, 'Oh what's that? This is my new favorite place.' I love that about New York.

I painted billboards above every candy store in Brooklyn.

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.

There are a lot of bars and shoe stores in my early books.

A big shop in Manhattan would feel like we were betraying our roots. And we're not just going to open a bunch of stores.

I started writing because I saw such a huge lack of complex stories about the inner city.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

I'm a straight shooter, a New York City girl. I see things as they are and call them as they are.

What is New York? A straightforward answer: seven million people crushed onto an island originally settled by the Dutch. But it's more than that. These are seven million who were, mainly, not even born here.

The Long Island experience is so strange. You're a satellite around the city, so the presence of the city is always looming.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

I feel comfortable in places like London. You get many cultures in L.A. but it's strangely segregated.

I can't imagine finding success and then moving to a building in Manhattan with 300 strangers, like a bunch of little ants going home at night.