City Dynamics Quotes

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

There's a lot of talent in South Central L.A., in Compton and Long Beach and Watts, and the city north of Pico pretty much sits back and waits for that talent to emerge and then steps in.

City's just a jungle; more games to play Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away I was raised in the country, I been workin' in the town I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

In a real estate man's eye, the most expensive part of the city is where he has a house to sell

Los Angeles is a sophisticated city; it has no eccentricities and no heart.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

The most dynamic cities have always been immersed in the critical innovations of their time.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.

New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

I love Los Angeles. It reinvents itself every two days.

But in New York, it’s different—even uptown it’s really grand, and there’s no real segregation there. It’s all mixed up.

[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.

I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

There are all these levels of pretension in LA. Every time you walk into a café or a bar or a restaurant in LA everybody turns around to see if you're famous. Everybody can seem like a celebrity. You can meet somebody who looks like Joe Schmoe and he turns out to be the head of HBO or something. Or you meet a person who just won an Oscar and he looks like he just won an Oscar. And it's a sprawling city, there's so many different parts to it.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

It's all about connectivity - not just technical connectivity but geographic connectivity. That's what makes a city go.

New York is breaking my heart. I’ve often said that it’s like having a really interesting boyfriend suddenly becoming really, really into wine, and having to have endless conversations about it.