Peter Conrad Quotes

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

I wrote a book of essays about New York called 'The Colossus of New York,' but it's not about - you know, when I'm writing about rush hour or Central Park, it's not a black Central Park, it's just Central Park, and it's not a black rush hour, it's just rush hour.

I love, love writing about Los Angeles. I love exploring every part of it. And I find, rather than a burden, it's actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing process for me. I love everything about L.A. Okay, not the traffic. But I love the way it looks. I love the geography. I love the diversity.

You can get the true essence of New Yorkers by just hanging out in Central Park.

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.

Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

There are many sides of the urban life that I dislike, but there are many sides I am deeply in love with and attached to.

When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.

I go down the street thinking, 'Oh my God, I live in New York.' But then I think, 'Oh my God, I'm on Broadway!'

I love cities. New York, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, L.A... but, I do choose to live in Vancouver. It's home.

I do not go outdoors... As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.

If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. So you're in Chicago. If you stand on the corner of Belmont and Clark, and you do that for three years, you'll pretty much have seen everybody in Chicago pass that junction.

All my best friends live downtown in New York City. I was made in Soho.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

One of the things I love about 'Rubicon' is I really recognize the New York City that they're depicting in it, having lived here for 15 years.

I wanted to experience New York, to look up and see buildings.

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

I love driving in the city at night.

The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city.

I've always been drawn to city skylines.

I'm a city boy. I grew up in a big city, in Birmingham, and I want to write about a city. It's much richer tapestry for me than green fields. Fields and wild life make me feel ill. I don't like - I don't want to write about that stuff.

As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.