William Hazlitt Quotes

I loved New York — every inch of it. It was a little bit scary at that time, but still, the excitement was so strong — visually and intellectually. It was like a monster.

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

I don't like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

I live not too far from it in New York City.

I grew up in New York.

Believe it or not, the sky is blue here in Glasgow. I absolutely love it here.

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.

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

As I criss-cross the city hurrying, I feel always the unchanging cold beneath the pavement.

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

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.

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

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.

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.

I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

I'm a creature of the New York City streets.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Through that windshield I saw a city that didn’t know it was hungry and a reflection of a guy who was FREE.

Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.

New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.

They who have already enjoyed the crowds and noise of the great city, know their desire to return is little more than the restlessness of a vacant mind, that they are not so much led by hope as driven by disgust, and wish rather to leave the country than to see the town.

Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life!