Urban Opportunities Quotes

One of the pleasures of living in London is the opportunity to do things that are only possible in a city of its size.

I am haunted by what my life would have been had I not had the courage in my early twenties to leave Pittsburgh for New York City and really commit to being a writer. Pittsburgh is both post-industrial and provincial, and the opportunities there are limited. It would have been quite easy to simply drift through life.

If you're a suburban kid, and you're 30 minutes from New York City, that's the luckiest thing in the world.

What I really like is that Chicago is a big city: it has a large market, and you are exposed to everything, like shows and plays.

Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities.

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.

New York is a wonderful place to be up, an awful place to be down.

New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.