Urban Fatigue Quotes

New York is a fascinating city. I think it's a very inspiring city, but it's overpowering when you get older. It tires me now. But it's wonderful for young people - very inspiring and full of surprises and full of ideas.

I grew up in big cities my whole life, and in my late 20s, I just felt like I was looking for something else.

But what is coffee, but a noxious berry, Born to keep used-up Londoners awake?

Those who have past much of their lives in this great city, look upon its opulence and its multitudes, its extent and variety, with cold indifference; but an inhabitant of the remoter parts of the kingdom is immediately distinguished by a kind of dissipated curiosity, a busy endeavour to divide his attention amongst a thousand objects, and a wild confusion of astonishment and alarm.

For most visitors to Manhattan, both foreign and domestic, New York is the Shrine of the Good Time. "I don't see how you stand it," they often say to the native New Yorker who has been sitting up past his bedtime for a week in an attempt to tire his guest out. "It's all right for a week or so, but give me the little old home town when it comes to living." And, under his breath, the New Yorker endorses the transfer and wonders himself how he stands it.

After endless days of commuting on the freeway to an antiseptic, sealed-window office, there is a great urge to backpack in the woods and build a fire.

I've sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees.

Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig!

I can't stay in L.A. too long or it starts to grow on me in a bad way.

I think with success you do get a little more guarded and you start to change your friends. You become more isolated. And you start hanging around with people who have money! I think that's the biggest thing. Once you do get a bit of change in your pocket, you start hanging around with other people who have some change. It was kind of strange to all of a sudden go from one extreme-Manhattan-to where I went, upstate New York. But I did it because I was dying in the city. I couldn't take it. I couldn't take one more dinner party. I couldn't take one more party, period.

The older I get and the longer I live in New York City, the more I have the desire to go elsewhere and be surrounded by nature.

On the evening bus, the tense, pinched faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell us more than we care to know. On the expressways, middle management men pose without grace behind their wheels as they flee city and job.

Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.

I got tired of New York. I mean when you grow up somewhere, uh, I just basically wanted something different for myself and if I was planning on having a family.

At 18, I took a Greyhound bus to New York City, and then I was in city after city, so I was just dying to get to the country. Everywhere I'd go, I'd just shoot out to a national park somewhere and reconnect.

Life is very busy now. I find that in today's cities, the public is very tired after working the whole day. When concerts start at eight o'clock, the wife pushes the husband to go to the concert, where some promptly fall asleep!

Everything in New York is a fight. It's a fight to get on the subway. It's a fight to go to CVS. It's a fight to get a cab. And eventually, it wears you down.

Why one day in the country Is worth a month in town; Is worth a day and a year Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion That days drone elsewhere.

I am finished with cities. I spent four years in New York, ten in Paris, and I was in Belgrade for a while. To me now they are just airports.

I loved living in London in my 20s and 30s, but after a while, you kind of go, 'Right, is this it? Is this it for the rest of my days? Or is there some other possibility?'

Three days in a city now and I'm quite flipped. There's too much noise. I just can't do with it.

New York is too strenuous for me; it gets on my nerves.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.

Don't get me wrong - I love London, and still have an apartment there. But it is also a hard city and it wears you down.