David Sedaris Quotes

Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

Despite my critical take on the city, I love Delhi, on the whole - love its monuments, love how easily graspable the city's turbulent history is. The negative things I write about are considered normal here.

Transformed people transform cities.

Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

It would be a nice place if you took all the people out of the city.

D.C. is a great place. The music, jazz, has always been great here, the restaurants have always been fantastic here. And there's been a lot of changes in this city over the last 30 years, and all for the better.

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

There is no other city as vulgar and obscene as Osaka. We should celebrate the image and welcome the development of casinos and red-light districts to attract people.

By giving our audience intimate access to the lives of musicians, we hope to raise awareness of the region's beautiful cultural heritage and present a more nuanced portrait of its people.

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.

How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!

Every city in the world can be improved in less than three years.

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.

We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?

Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.

I love going to the river not only to enjoy nature, but to think about the Los Angeles River's place in our city's history and to envision its great place in our future.

From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.

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.

In a word I claim that our city as a whole is an education to Greece.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.