Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. It's also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower.
I live in a high-rise apartment building, so I just have two cats. They're both pound kitties. One of them, Dick, is an evil, foot-biting cat. When I write a tiger morph, I'm always imagining Dick.
What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.
I remember saying to my mom, 3 years old, every day, ‘I can fly!’ Living on the ninth floor, it was dangerous.
Relaxing at home in his 55th-floor condominium before a game, Sammy Sosa is the same as at the ball park: focused but funny, exuberant but reserved. He is in a strange country, conversing in two languages, but his every movement displays a combination of confidence and humility.
The need to express yourself in Los Angeles makes the city so vibrant. If I lived here, it would be lovely to be in a cool new high-rise looking out over a city that is exploding.
I always had this New York fantasy of living in a glass high-rise.
To allow millions of people to live together on limited land, we have to go to the sky; we have to build a high rise. But we can still build nature and social space into the towers. Each family can have their own courtyard in the sky.
In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.
Living in areas with a high population density does not need to be synonymous with overcrowding. Manhattan has an extremely dense population and is considered by many to be a highly desirable place to live.
I don't like condo life.
If you look at the back pages of 'New York Times Magazine,' and they talk about these 6.5-million-dollar condos with a great view, like you're going to pay for a great view. Well, the top floor of the projects have a great view, too.
The decision to write full-time meant I couldn't afford to buy a house. A friend kindly offered me the use of his apartment in a thirty-six-story building full of newlywed couples in the southern area of Jakarta. I didn't like my working space at first, but the scenery and everything going on outside have worked their magic on me.
Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
Living your life 40 floors up, looking out every day on ocean and skies, you see the world from a different point of view. It's like living in a very interesting fishbowl, but since no one can see up here, it's like a fishbowl with a limo tint.
