Fran Lebowitz Quotes

No one is going to come here if it's a filthy city, if it's not a safe city.

See, New York is over the hill. It's swallowed up in its own garbage. And the people - I can't stand the people.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

We moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1979, when I was five. The funny thing is that, even though Baltimore had one of the top murder rates in the country in those days, I grew up hearing about how dangerous New York was.

Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.

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.

New York was scarier than Baltimore ever was. It was terrible in the '70s. I'm glad they cleaned it up. I got mugged; I had to go to the hospital. Every time you went out, you got robbed. It was horrible. You can't imagine.

Newark faces real challenges.

Long Beach is fast. Every day, you hear something bad; somebody gets hurt.

I don't wish for anybody to go out of business, but I think there are far too many things in New York that really shouldn't be here.

Mumbai is becoming more and more of a nightmare.

In Chicago 3,000 people have been shot since January 1st. We're not going to let that happen. Our inner cities are almost at an all-time low, run by the Democrats for sometimes more than a hundred years, chain unbroken.

The other day I read that last year 58 million tourists came to New York ... where a puny eight million people are trying to live. Unless they own a hotel chain, I don't think a single one of these eight million people are happy about this.

I can think of a number of areas in New York where three acres of nuclear waste would make the neighborhood safer to walk around in than it is now, and better lit.

You look at the inner cities and you see bad education, no jobs, no safety. You walk to the grocery store with your child and you get shot. You walk outside to look and see what's happening, and you get shot. In Chicago 3,000 people have been shot since January 1st. I am not going to let that happen.

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 love New York, but I don't like how it smells like hot pee and garbage in the summer. I feel like Chicago isn't that way. Maybe I'm just being romantic.

For a long time a lot of people thought New Orleans wasn't a safe place and that it was very ratchet.

Crime is out of control in Baltimore City.

Living in Rio is dangerous sometimes.

Our metropolises are blighted by two problems: a lack of public transport and a lack of public loos.

I grew up in the city of Detroit, where things were just bad.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

Walking the streets of San Francisco can be a frightening, demoralizing, even an unhealthy experience for residents and tourists alike.

Look at New York and the number of crimes out there. Every big city has crime. Bombay is the biggest city of India. So, naturally, all crimes in Bombay get banner headlines.