Erin Cummings Quotes

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

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.

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

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Good and bad make up a city.

Cities are immortal.

I wrote a book of essays about New York called 'The Colossus of New York,' but it's not about - you know, when I'm writing about rush hour or Central Park, it's not a black Central Park, it's just Central Park, and it's not a black rush hour, it's just rush hour.

I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign, and I look above the other signs and window dressing, and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings. That presence of the old city has always moved me.

Every time you think of a city, you have to think green, green, green. Every time you see concrete jungle, you must find open spaces. And when you find open spaces, make it so people can get to them.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.

Out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy but has spread right across Europe and beyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another.

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

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

When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.

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.

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'

I really don't know the Chicago School. You see, I never walk. I always take taxis back and forth to work. I rarely see the city.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

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

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.