Urban Vibrancy Quotes

Hackney gets a bit of a bad rap, but it's the only place I've ever lived that felt like a community. I know my neighbours.

To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme.

There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.

I like New York. There are similarities with London that make it feel rather like home, but at the same time it's slightly fictional.

I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

I love New York. It's hard to explain, but it's the energy of the city. It's not like L.A. where everything is spread out.

That New York energy, when you've got the benefit of great weather, it really is terrific. You look up at that skyline, and the Empire State Building is literally in your eyesight - there's nothing like that.

The energy in Atlanta is a different type of energy.

It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own).

Cities are a melting pot for different ideas, and diversity brings a high-energy rhythm that I don't think we'd know was gone until it was too late.

To me, the difference between New York and London is that things are boring and staid in London.

I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again. The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.

I love Milan, and I'm not just saying that. It's a city that gives me a great sense of euphoria. I can't explain why, but I feel a special energy there.

I'm so glad cities have personalities, just like people have personalities. That's something that makes me smile.

...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.

Chicago's neighborhoods have always been this city's greatest strength.

In the middle 1940s... I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be.

Oakland's got a lot of character.

Manhattan, after eight years here, still reminds me of Hong Kong. There are parts of Chinatown that are the spit and image of streets in Wan Chai, and I am held in thrall by the Chrysler building as much as I was by I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower.

I was in Mexico City. It's a very pleasant city in many ways. It's vibrant, lively, pretty exciting society, but also depressing in other ways, and sometimes almost hopeless, you know. So it's a combination of vibrancy and, I wouldn't say despair, but hopelessness, you know. Doesn't have to be, but it is. I mean, there is almost no economy.

Atlanta is a city that welcomed me from the first day.

You've always lived here, right?" Sarah asked. "Except for the years I went to college." "Didn't you ever want to move away? To experience something new?" "Like bistros?" She nudged him playfully with her elbow. "No, not just that. Cities have a vibrancy, a sense of excitement that you can't find in a small town." "I don't doubt it. But to be honest, I've never been interested in things like that. I don't need those things to make me happy. A nice quiet place to unwind at the end of the day, beautiful views, a few good friends. What else is there?

Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.

Oddly, I'm not a huge fan of Brisbane in Australia. I can't quite put my finger on why - it just seemed to lack verve, and I don't have any great desire to go back.