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.

The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us.

I think we'll see a leveling off and then a contraction of population, not a continued upward trend.

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

I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.

[Suburbia] represents, after all, the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. We built it during our most affluent period of history, and in the decades to come we will be comparatively destitute collectively. In short, we will not have the resources to retrofit most of suburbia.

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