Roger Allam Quotes

I do my days at the station and then get my training in.

Boston has a lot of European qualities to it, and one of them is the charm of its above-ground trollies.

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

When I thought about Detroit, I would think big city, very urban - not a lot of places to walk around, not a lot of parks. I sort of pictured Manhattan almost, where, besides Central Park, it's all city and big buildings. But now that I'm here, you see people pushing strollers, people hanging out in the park.

I like taking the subway to work.

Every day, getting up early in the morning before much traffic, my wife takes me 10 miles from home, drops me off, and I have to get back.

I can't get enough of London! I love all the picnic benches, the old-school phone booths and parks in the middle of the city.

Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York.

In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

I take the subway to work. I love mass transportation.

Aesthetically, London is just beautiful; it's a gorgeous city. The architecture, monuments, the parks, the small streets - it's an incredible place to be.

I like to read on the train.

What's fun about shooting exteriors on the street in Toronto is that there are cable cars.

One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.

I use New York to talk about home, but the ideas in 'Colossus' could be transferred to other cities. The story about Central Park is really about the first day of spring in any park. The Coney Island chapter is really about beaches and summer and heat waves.

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.

I commuted an hour and a half each way to high school in N.Y.C. I took a bus, a ferry, then a subway.

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.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

From this distance, in the dimness, the model looked surreal, made up of parts filled with buildings, bordered by long stretches of empty space. It reminded me of the way cities and towns look when you are flying at night. You can't make out much. But the places where people have come together, and stayed, are collections of tiny lights, breaking up the darkness.

And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.