Berenice Abbott Quotes

I love, love writing about Los Angeles. I love exploring every part of it. And I find, rather than a burden, it's actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing process for me. I love everything about L.A. Okay, not the traffic. But I love the way it looks. I love the geography. I love the diversity.

You can get the true essence of New Yorkers by just hanging out in Central Park.

New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.

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.

The world's major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

Good and bad make up a city.

There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.

I have the same sense of discovery and exhilaration from objects of design and everyday use - I am inspired by the buildings in my city, by park greenery and dazzling store windows, by the jaunty strollers and umbrellas and billboards I walk past. Just strolling our streets, we encounter creativity every single day.

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.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people - but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them - or more, a comment upon their lives - or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

Kolkata does not look like a Delhi or Mumbai. The city has its identity.

It is the vibe of a city that makes it unique.

I've never lived anywhere else in my life, I have a massive love-hate relationship with this city. I grew up in the western suburbs in the '80s and for everything we had to go to south Bombay - so you lived the whole city, in a sense.

I think there's a big difference between New York and Chicago.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.

There are a thousand viewpoints in the viewtiful city.

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

I've been in New York for 14 years. I would never leave for good. The city is so much more alive than so many other places, and I think it is fodder for performers. You see so much; research is thrown at you everywhere you go. There was a rat on the subway train recently - you saw the video online - that's fantastic! That's something that is so specific to this city, the way you are pushed up against humanity, and the animal kingdom, whether you want to be or not. It's a stimulating city - physically, intellectually, culturally. It never ceases to thrill me.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

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.

New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.