Paul Hollywood Quotes

...Skyscraper National Park

I always wanted to at least visit Dubai - it was a city that I loved to watch on the Discovery Channel. It had the world's biggest everything and clearly had a vision to stand out.

The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.

What the Olympics and other mega-events have shown is that the significant investment required to host an international games successfully has the power to transform a region, and even a nation.

Berlin is my favourite city.

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

Los Angeles has always been on the table with us.

The international game has changed for bidding cities.

I think any city that does the Olympics takes on the world and has to grow and has to kind of assimilate all sorts of folks.

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.

I got to travel to Japan. I never in my life thought I would go to Japan.

If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

A skyscraper is a boast in glass and steel.

The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags.

I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

I state the threefold purpose of my travels in Arabia: to see the country, to write about it and to be of some service to its people and their cause - that is what brought me from beyond the seas, from America.

I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

I've watched towns and cities evolve and become very resilient, and fun, and unique, and prosperous on their own terms. And the secret is bridging. It's when the local church has a fun clothing swap fundraiser with a temple, and then the next year they bring in the mosque.

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

Those who visit foreign nations, but who associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs 'caelum non animum mutant': they see new meridians, but the same men, and with heads as empty as their pockets.