“My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.”

Ideas can come while reading a good novel.

I never show the back of my tongue. That is a Dutch expression.

Architecture falls between art and airports. It’s pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.

Cities are gentrified by the following types of people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious (artists), then the risk-aware (developers), finally the risk adverse (dentists from New Jersey).

NY is the city it is today in part because of the contributions from generations of artistic visionaries

Suppose we took a thousand negatives… combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture.

Lincolnshire is the Idaho of England. You were either going to drive a tractor for the rest of your life or head for the city to work in a factory.

And when I told my sons I might be in City of Ember, they said, ‘Oh! You’re gonna be the mayor?’ And I hadn’t even read the script yet.

You wrestle one night, get up the next morning and fly out to the next city.

There is no doubt that many expensive national projects may add to our prestige or serve science. But none of them must take precedence over human needs. As long as Congress does not revise its priorities, our crisis is not just material, it is a crisis of the spirit.

Cities vary widely in the use of DNA testing.