All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Benazir Bhutto doesn't cease to exist the moment she gets married. I am not giving myself away. I belong to myself and I always shall.

I will not serve God like a labourer, in expectation of my wages.

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

If you don't go to other men's funerals, they won't go to yours.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.

When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

He is the best preacher, not that tickles the ear, but that breaks the heart.