Erik Larson Quotes

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects.

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

I think Chicago's a great city. Like New York, it's full of energy.

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

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.

When I walk through the city, I just think that I see my family. I see us in everybody, you know? I see us.

Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration.

When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.

The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.

Cities are magical things. You know the energy in them. You have to walk the streets in any borough here and you can see between what was in this city in the 1970's and where it is today and how much more energy there is and how much more just sheer.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.

New York - The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say "These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.

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

The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.

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

Brooklyn is a hub; people move to Brooklyn because of what's already in Brooklyn.

From the moment I stepped foot in Music City I have had a love affair with the people and burgeoning culinary scene. This city's long, highly-respected cultural history, coupled with the recent growth and development is inspiring. I could not be happier with my decision and I'm truly excited to call Nashville my home.

The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.