(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.