Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream,...

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past...

(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter...

She’d first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win’s, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and...

Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Nature made the fields and man the cities.

Mind you, Thunder Bay has a lot of outskirts. It’s actually two cities melded together, so in a sense it has twice as many outskirts as other places. It’s understandable that we got lost….

I’m so glad cities have personalities, just like people have personalities. That’s something that makes me smile.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by...

A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

Journeys to relive your past?’ was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: ‘Journeys to recover your future?’And Marco’s answer was: ‘Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller...

The grandeur of the thieving falsity is larceny, the fall of cities.

I, sometimes, fear that probably I’ll just keep changing cities, and may be someday I’ll also travel the world, but never find another soul who thinks exactly the way I do.

There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that technology, which was supposed to cut the ties between people and places and allow people everywhere to work from almost anywhere, turns out to...

Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design...

And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.

Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stationsWe crossed cities that turn-tabled all dayAnd vomited at night the sunshine of the day (“The Voyager”)

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna,...

It is a duty of every citizen to pray for those who are authority and the nation; so that each one of us may live a peaceful and quiet lives in sacredness.

I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

How can you measure progress if you don’t know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the “market” put a price on things – food, clothes, electricity, running water – when...

La città di Leonia rifà se stessa tutti i giorni: ogni mattina la popolazione si risveglia tra lenzuola fresche, si lava con saponette appena sgusciate dall’involucro, indossa vestaglie nuove fiammanti, estrae dal più perfezionato frigorifero...

There are more hidden spaces in a city, more hidden lives and hidden emptinesses, and more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight.

I’ve always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don’t sleep – some don’t – but they live there....

I don’t like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity–say, while waiting to be called to eat–becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are...

Cities perform most functions in a very Industrial Age model.

Oh you dear companionsElectric bells of the stations song of the reapersButcher’s sleigh regiment of unnumbered streetsCavalry of bridges nights livid with alcoholThe cities I’ve seen lived like mad women(The Voyager)

Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale...

Detroit is big enough to matter in the world and small enough for you to matter in it.

In cities it is useless to look at the stars or to describe them, worship them, or seek direction from them. When lost, one should follow the tracks of the camels.

Different cities visit us daily, they exist in the clouds.

We didn’t make the mistakes that many other cities did.

Cities have the capability to at any moment shift out of the familiar, even if you’ve lived in one all your life.

Working in Tokyo has convinced me that, contrary to what people think, it is actually one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a...

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,’ [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. ‘They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that...

…cities are murky places – hatching grounds for monsters…

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity,...

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This...

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we...

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city...

God gave us ground we created a city, God gave us time we need to create a future.

Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren’t at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn’t...

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would...

The world’s major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back...