Patrick Kavanagh 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.

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

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.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

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

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

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

We city dwellers, we residents of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, are for the most part urbanized to some extent. We know deadlines, start times and traffic.

The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

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 will say that growing up as a kid in an urban environment and having lived in cities all my life, the one achievement that everyone can look forward to is getting the perfect parking spot.

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

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.

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.

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.

The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.

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

Good and bad make up a city.

I'm in love with cities. I find them amazing, the quiet co-ordination of thousands of people, going about what we're trying to do, and that organism of the city nurturing human aspiration, and the actual city fabric itself being a special thing rather than just infrastructure.

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.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

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.