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.

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.

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

Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads, fills citified ears—as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk happy.

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

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.

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

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.

Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.