"What with hamburgers and ice cream cones, Garfield and James Dean, this homespun
Indiana farm town has more than enough credits to be named the county seat of American pop culture.
It has a Guernsey face and a Baskin-Robbins soul." - Rheta S. Johnson on Fairmont, Indiana
"...the center of the consciousness of the human universe." - Allen Ginsberg on
Liverpool, England
"The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel
through it one's self to be acquainted with it." - Lord Chesterfield
"The most knowledgeable golf galleries are those in Scotland and England. No
question. Most people over there understand golf whether or not they play it." - Tom Watson
"A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect
traveler does not know where he came from." - Lin Yutang
"...where tomorrow fell in love with yesterday, and side by side they lived happily
ever after." - Paul Harvey on Paris, Texas
"Even though I've moved North, I like being a Southern girl. I think the South
has a nice approach to life." - Devin Rene De Vasquez
"No wise man will go to live in the country, unless he has something to do
which can be better done in the country." - Samuel Johnson
"Lobster is one of our biggest tourist attractions." - Becky Reed on Maine
"There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is
like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast." - Paul
Scott Mowrer
"October 15th, 1770, went to view some land which Colonel [Valentine] Crawford
patented for me near the Youghiogheny River, distance about twelve miles west of Connellsville. This
includes as fine a land as I have ever seen, a great deal of level land; it is well watered and
has a very valuable mill site..." - George Washington's entry into his personal diary on Perryopolis,
Pennsylvania
"The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there." - Edouard Manet
"I'm not impressed by metropolises. I'm no country bumpkin with hay in my hair.
I've been all over the world." - Dave Winfield
"To most people, the middle of the country and the prairie is not very scenic. To me,
it is majestic, absolutely majestic." - Garrison Keillor
"I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on Earth." -
Steve McQueen
"A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn't be." -
Alexander Woollcott
"It's only about thirty miles outside of London, but it's very country - Ripley
is not even a town, it's a village with farms all around it. And very few people ever leave
there. They usually stay, get jobs, get married." - Eric Clapton on his hometown
"Hollywood - a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars."
- Fred Allen
"Divine nature gave the fields, human art built cities." - Varro
"The city is not obsolete; it's the center of our civilization." - Edward
Logue
"Washington, that grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Hopeless." -
Mark Twain
"On the physical side, I hate the ugly city...but I find in it the intellectual
companionship which I crave." - Hamlin Garland
"Philadelphia is a great nosh city, because it's a city of street eaters. You
walk and eat at the same time. I grew up on cheese-steaks and hoagies. New York is fabulous because
you even have Chinese food on the street. And then there are specialties like egg creams. In
Los Angeles you can only have noshes that won't ruin the steering wheel of your car, because
no one is walking. If you want to nosh in Los Angeles, open your mouth. The only nosh out there
is a mouthful of smog." - David Brenner
"The city is an open book in which to read aims and ambitions." - Eliel Saarinen
"Only the modern city offers the mind the grounds on which it can achieve awareness
of itself." - Georg Wilhelm Hegel
"Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "hell yes, I'm from Texas' deserves
whatever happens to him." - Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
"There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the
globe." - Don Herold
"The first requisite to happiness is birth in a great city." - Euripides
"An old Greek once said that a city with over 300,000 people wasn't worth living
in. It's still true." - Walter Matthau
"City life: Millions of people being lonesome together." - Henry David Thoreau
"Many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a
country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel
uneasy till he gets back." - E.B. White
"Cities are growing so fast their arteries are showing through their outskirts."
- Clyde Moore
"A quiet city is a contradiction in terms." - Max Beerbohn
"I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all." - Michelangelo Antonioni
"I always seem to suffer from loss of faith on entering cities." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It's an inner core of goofiness surrounded by complete politeness." - Karal Ann
Marling on Minnesota
"Hollywood - a place where the inmates are in charge of the asylum." - Laurence Stallings
"In New York I get scared of talking to a telephone operator. People bark at each
other. The word 'please' is like some form of advanced voodoo." - Walter Matthau
"A twofold national problem is how to preserve the wilderness in the country and get
rid of the jungle in the cities." - Bill Vaughan
"Most of the people living in New York have come here from the farm to try to make
enough money to go back to the farm." - Don Marquis
"We are lush with mosquitoes." - Garrison Keillor on Minnesota
"TO be raised in Philadelphia is like being born with a big nose - you never get over it."
- Anonymous
"Life runs fast and mean in this town. It's like living in an armed camp, a condition
of constant fear." - Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on Washington, D.C.
"This is virgin territory for whorehouses." - Al Capone on suburbia
"...are affluent slums" - Joseph Wood Krutch on the suburbs
"Anyone who suggests I run for governor is no friend of mine. It requires
living in Albany, which is small-town life at its worst." - Ed Koch
"There are just three big cities in the United States hat are story cities -
New York, of course, New Orleans, and the best of the lot, San Francisco." - Frank Norris
"Pittsburgh - a heterosexual's San Francisco." - Sports Illustrated
"With it's rich ethnic mix, world class smuggling scene, exotic political
intrigue, and resort glitz, Miami has turned into a dramatist's dream..." - Lewis Grossberger
"That's great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you'd want to
spend more than three hours in." - Jerry Della Femina
"San Diego is as close to Utopia as any American city of metropolitan size is likely to come." - Jack Smith
"Psychiatrists are few in Honolulu and reputedly doing a lousy business. When life
gets a little too oppressive in these parts, we just have another drink. If you don't look at trouble,
it either goes away or else sticks around and becomes friendly like everybody else." - Robert Carson
"Time past has a wonderful way of remaining time present here. I once wrote a line, 'The day turns holy as
though God moves through it.' At moments that's the way I feel about Key West." - Tennessee Williams
"I never want to leave New York again. Los Angeles is OK for two or three weeks, but then I need this city.
It's got the worst and the best. It's got everything." It's real. I love it." - Tom Snyder
"I didn't like the life here in New York. There is no greenery. It would make a stone sick." - Nikita S. Khrushchev
"Oh to be in L.A. when the polyethyl-vinyl trees are in bloom!" - Herb Gold
"...is like a World's Fair that has been on a year too long." - Sonny Fox on
Hollywood
"Living in Hollywood is like living in a granola bar. Full of flakes, nuts and
fruits." - David Letterman
"When I got off the plane I asked a guy what time it was, and he said to me,
'What do I look like, a clock?' That's when I knew I was home." - Jim Valvano on New York City
"In some ways, Phoenix is about five years behind a place like Los Angeles
in the way people dress, the way they act, the way they see things. But the people are friendly
here. They're not pushy. I don't like pushy people." - Patty Duffek
"It is said that New York and London take the nonsense out of man." - Ralph Waldo
Emerson
"People in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, don't care who wins the Stanley Cup as long
as they're watching good hockey." - Wayne Gretzky
"Pittsburgh was settled by fleshy men of broad backs and ethnic diversity...big
men...united by the mill and a love of sports." - The Washington Post
"We arrived in Philadelphia on Sunday but it wasn't open." - Laurence J. Peter
"In Pittsburgh's old, smoky days one could hardly hear the steps of the men who
emerged from the fog, coming from nowhere and disappearing into nowhere." - Stefan Lorant
"Did you hear about the tornado that hit Cleveland? It caused one million dollars
worth of improvements." - Bill Burns
"Chicago - a pompous Milwaukee." - Leonard Louis Levinson
"Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it." - Claes Oldenburg
"...Back to Chicago; it's never dull out there. You never know exactly what kind
of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town; but you can always count on something."
- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
"Beverly Hills - a pool's paradise." - Leonard Louis Levinson
"Anyone who's ever climbed the streets of San Francisco will appreciate the
native's observation: 'The wonderful thing about this city is that when you get tired, you can
always lean against it'." - Anonymous
"Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel." - Oscar Levant
"The English winter - ending in July, to recommence in August." - Lord Byron
"Las Vegas is a strip of lights bounded by slot machines. The only town I know
where Western Union has messages already printed for sending home for money." - Jim Bishop
"Pasadena - a cemetary with lights." - Laurence J. Peter
"Boston - a festering mud puddle." - Ellis Arnall
"...Something in the air. 'The Tacoma aroma,'locals call it, a lung-raking
stench of noxious lumber-milling fumes and other foul industrial emissions that imparted a
green-gilled tinge to most members of the Springsteen tour party..." - Kurt Loder on Tacoma,
Washington
"If I owned Texas and Hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell." - General Phil
Sheridan
"I went into five stores and not one of the salespersons I asked for help could
speak English. They just shrug their shoulders. Is this America or what?" - Raymond LaCombe on
Miami
"I am nauseated by the attitude of people in my country, too. All they want
to do is lie around and watch TV. They don't want to work, they expect the state to support
them." - Joan Collins on England
"When a New Yorker looks as if he has a suntan; it's probably rust." - Laurence
J. Peter
"The best thing about Winnepeg is getting on the plane out." - Charlie Simmer
"Orange [Texas] isn't the end of the world, but if you get up on your tiptoes,
you can see it from there." - "Bum" Phillips
