urban allure Quotes

The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape

As a kid growing up in a small town in Washington State, my only exposure to New York City was through movies. The town with its towering skyscrapers, fascinating people and teeming energy absolutely captivated me.

I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it.

I discovered Los Angeles in the late '90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.

Mumbai's infectious. Once you start living in Mumbai, working in Mumbai, I don't think you can live anywhere else.

There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow.

People almost always imagine that life is going to be better in town and that the streets of the town are paved with gold.

Better a square foot of New York than all the rest of the world in a lump - better a lamppost on Broadway than the brightest star in the sky.

The virtue of the country is that it makes you thirsty for the city.

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.

Well, I'm from Indiana. So to me when I was a little kid growing up, Cincinnati was the glamorous New York of it all.

I love how New York as an idea is less a paradigm of manifest destiny and more a romance for the social orphans of the world. We live here to be among the towers and the crowds.

I find L.A. kind of romantic, actually. As a movie junkie, it's a city that was built by the movies. There's something really weird and surreal about it that I find energizing.

All the experience of the greatest city in the world could not withhold me.

I could easily pen an entire novel on why I love this city, and believe me, I am a lifelong advocate of the Big Apple, yet somehow Nashville weaved its magic around me.

I'm obsessed with New York. I want to marry it, maybe bear a few children with 42nd Street.

New York is the thing that seduced me.

I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.

I was always running off to the city, whether it was Philly or New York, going somewhere where there was something more for me.

I loved the way she said 'LA'; I love the way everybody says 'LA' on the Coast; it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done.

You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can't. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights. I mean come on, there's nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.

What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?

The only dream I ever had was the dream of New York itself, and for me, from the minute I touched down in this city, that was enough. It became the best teacher I ever had.

I was possessed by London.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.