New York Architecture Quotes & Sayings

New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought. — Francis Picabia

Let's assume for the moment that the logic behind Presidents Day is actually sound for certain presidents. Why not have a separate holiday for Lincoln and one for Washington - as we used to do, before we became so concerned with the 'Every President Gets a Trophy' ethos? — Ben Shapiro

That's Manhattan today - all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis. — Andrew Vachss

The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along. — John Darnielle

We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. — Joshua Foer

Gold will buy the highest honours; and gold will purchase love. — Ovid

I always wanted to be an actor, but I always loved design, and growing up in New Orleans there was such great style, great architecture. I would decorate my little apartment in New York over and over again, because it only had a couple of rooms. And I did it for friends and family on the side just for fun. — Bryan Batt

After a few short years (fifteen, to be exact - brief by his count, interminable by hers), surrounded by all this vegetative rampancy, she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.
But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the
thinnest veneer. — Ruth Ozeki

When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city. — Christian De Portzamparc

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect - designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead. — H.P. Lovecraft

I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it's different - even uptown it's really grand, and there's no real segregation there. It's all mixed up. — Imogen Poots

The work of God in the cross of Christ strikes us as awe-inspiring only after we have first been awed by the glory of God. — Matt Chandler

Leslie inhabited a city of spectacular raids and speculative break-ins yet to occur, a world where criminal opportunities were hidden in the very architecture of the metropolis, just a different way of using its streets and buildings. Lines of sight, potential hiding places, how shadows were cast at different times of day, routes into and out of a bank vault, even the specific order of streets that led to and away from a chosen target: these were the landmarks Leslie looked for and noted. He inhabited a parallel New York, a wire diagram of every potential entrance and connection. Leslie — Geoff Manaugh

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness. — Ruth Ozeki

When we put people before possessions in our hearts, we are sowing seeds of enduring satisfaction. — Beverly LaHaye

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises. — Brian Eno

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us. — Daniel Libeskind

The United States is in many ways the biggest ghetto in the world. — Selma James

New York's architecture alone is enough to inspire a whole album. In fact, that's what happened at first - my early stuff was mostly just interpretations of landscapes. — Lana Del Rey

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect.
The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs. — Edith Wharton

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn't afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed — Ada Louise Huxtable

I went to school for engineering, I studied jazz. So I always had this kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York. — Joseph Kosinski

I have my family; I'm never alone. — Estelle

I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized. — Freeman Dyson

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties. — Peter York