P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

People who, like me, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s after World War II, grew up with cars.

As you move away from mass transit you become more dependent on the automobile, so you have to spread the housing out more to accommodate the cars.

Detroit in its heyday - let's say, 1920s to the '60s - was never a huge downtown-living thing. People lived in the neighborhoods.

The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.

A lot of times, L.A. is desaturated, and cement and freeways, and downtown.

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

The newspapers were against me. They were telling me that the Australian dream was a home. But that dream became worse and worse as they had to live further away from the city. My dream became better as we could build higher and higher.

At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

The electronics industry expanded rapidly and the seeds for the semiconductor and software revolution were planted. The postwar period also saw the suburbanization of America, the rise of the homeowner, the build-out of the interstate highway system, and the rise of automobile culture. Credit availability expanded dramatically.

Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever.

Discount air fares, a car in every parking space and the interstate highway system have made every place accessible - and every place alike.

I was attracted to the concept of Hollywood and the lifestyle here. But I've grown to mistrust it because it has changed. I didn't bargain for digital access parking in some concrete structure. Real heaven for me was to drive somewhere and park right in front. Now the city is going vertical.

You ingest the automobile in the very air of Detroit. Or at least you did in the 1940s and 1950s.

I looked around, and I saw cottages everywhere. I thought it was time they lived in apartments.

Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.

What is Southern California but an ever-changing dreamscape backdrop for the postmodern ideal? The psychology of the postmodern world is the continual state of change as we live in its idealist manufactured dream, built by developers.

The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.

In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.

The automobile is an American cultural symbol.

Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is.