John Updike Quotes

But I can tell you that the New York that I see now is not the New York that we grew up in. It's not 1973.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

The slums will be but a memory.

The city ... is involved in the fight for its life. One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle class residential neighborhoods.

In a lot of ways, New York isn't the city I moved to back in 1979. I'm old enough to separate my nostalgia for those days from the reality of how dangerous and uncertain they could be.

Chicago seems to follow New York, and coming from New York and being in real estate, I worry about things happening in Chicago that have happened in New York. I've seen a great city like New York go downhill. It has a wonderful financial downtown, but the rest of the city is not very nice.

I have lived in this city my whole life and have seen the way gentrification has changed it. I'm not necessarily against transplants, as 75 percent of my good friends, roommate, and boyfriend are not native New Yorkers.

I've lived in New York when I've had nothing, and I've lived in New York when I had money, and New York changes radically depending on how much money you have. It's the texture of life.

People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.

New York has always been a city of change and a city about change, and it is a back-leading development. Nobody's going to want to come to New York if it looks like another strip mall.

I grew up in the Bronx, but in Riverdale - not exactly an area of New York that's known for being rough and tumble.

You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.

San Francisco can no longer afford to be a city divided between downtown and neighborhoods, with a downtown that becomes a ghost town when workers go home for the evening.

Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.

I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.

The secret to the city is integration. Every area of the city should combine work, leisure and culture. Separate these functions and parts of the city die.

The negotiation of city space has been made more difficult with the idea that redevelopment is an improvement for some vague future - but it's never like that, is it? Once you get there, for economic reasons you have to generate the next project - so you're immediately starting to dig up something else, and so it goes on.

All sorts of creative communities are withering in New York because it's too hard to live here. It's ridiculous how expensive it is.

I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.

I'm in East L.A., like Mount Washington, Highland Park. There's a little strip that they're gentrifying, trying to make a hip spot, but you go there, and it's just kind of barren. Nobody hangs out anywhere in L.A. There's no loitering in L.A., so I don't know what to do with myself.

When I was growing up, we used to play basketball in a park that was never shoveled when it snowed. The basketball rims were never fixed. And we understood then that there was a relationship between public policy and our quality of life.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Somewhere along the way, New York became all about money. Or rather, it was always about money, but it wasn't all about money, if you know what I mean. New York's not Geneva or Zurich yet, but we're certainly heading in that direction. London is, too.