Mark Billingham Quotes

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

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.

I like living in the city. I really don't like the suburbs.

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.

Gray feels like the city.

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.

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 live in New York City, so there's so much stimulation when you walk outside, it does not require a television in the home.

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

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

I grew up in New York City - I grew up surrounded by every sound that you imagine can come from a New Yorker. All of the different boroughs and all of the different sounds.

I live in L.A., I grew up here, it's not that crazy for me because it's L.A., you know?

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.

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

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

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.

I don't think any other city in the world... the sun doesn't shine the same way anywhere as it does in New York. And then I guess everyone's very good at hanging out. Not in a crazy way, but you're just constantly interacting and learning.

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

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