Urban Mythology Quotes

As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.

Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

So you can't live in Manhattan?' she asked. Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. 'Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

New York was the Promised Land growing up. Writers were gods! The great gods of American culture... I thought.

When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.

I discovered Los Angeles in the late '90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.

There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.

'Ghost City' began as a idea. I felt that I hadn't read or heard a great deal about the sort of life that I thought I had, and I just thought that it would be interesting to sit down and see if I could put it down onto paper.

I imagined loading the God of the Sea into a taxi and taking him to the Upper East Side.

I remember being so homesick and realizing that where I came from was not something that existed in the cultural imagination outside the city. People used to think Miami was just partying in South Beach all the time.

Most of the books that feature supernatural characters blending with the modern world and are usually set in big cities.

He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion... no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.

L.A. streets aren't just paved real estate but a cosmology, a manifestation of the city's sensibility.

Growing up so close to New York City, I always loved going to the city, but I'd be disappointed because songs about New York always made it seem so magical and perfect, and when I was younger, I just thought it was busy and dirty.

Every doorway, every intersection has a story.

Although Damascus is considered the oldest city in the world, the date of its foundation going beyond tradition, there are very few relics of antiquity in or near it.

I hate people thinking their city is unique, but there is a certain aura about Los Angeles; it's not necessarily a beautiful thing, but it's part of Harry Bosch.

I love filming in London. In New York, every street is familiar because you have seen it in a movie. They mythologise their own city. You're forever trying to get down streets that have been blocked off because of shooting. In London, they don't put up with it; they're grumpy.

'Kraken' is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it's more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It's London as a kind of fantasy kingdom.

L.A. is, on one hand, very mysterious; it's very modern. It's a mysterious place - it's a haunting place - and everything in our culture around the world of entertainment leads back to Hollywood.

The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in pursuit of wealth, tried for the first time to live together - and failed.