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...