We're not going to reform our moronic land-use laws, which mandate suburban sprawl one way or another. They're simply going to be ignored when it becomes self-evident that we cannot build stuff that way anymore.

Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as "consumers." OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word "consumer" in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having. And we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.

The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.