Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?

Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there. 

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.