Thomas Heatherwick Quotes

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

I actually grew up in the City of Pasadena.

I actually don't trust anyone who tells me they don't like New York.

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.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

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.

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

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

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

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

The one thing that all great cities have in common is that they are all different.

City people live the city. We live in L.A., New York, we live in places where it's chaotic and you never know what's gonna happen. And that's the music - you never know what's gonna happen.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

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.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are.

Good and bad make up a city.

Cities are immortal.

I use New York to talk about home, but the ideas in 'Colossus' could be transferred to other cities. The story about Central Park is really about the first day of spring in any park. The Coney Island chapter is really about beaches and summer and heat waves.

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.