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"Every person on the streets of New York is a type. The city is one big theater where everyone is on display."
Author Name
Personal Development
"L.A. is my American city."
Author Name
Personal Development
"San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years."
Author Name
Personal Development
"London is the clearing-house of the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When there were fears about the future of this nation's older cities... when a few of the cities teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, all eyes were focused on Chicago for contrast."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Edinburgh is alive with words."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."
Creativity
"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
Literature
"It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me."
Growth
"Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket."
Integrity
"I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job."
Research
"I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us."
Future
"I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from."
Reflection
"The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial."
Politics
"You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story."
Creativity
"In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it."
Crime
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