By the end of the book, it is quite different than the way you thought it would be when you started the book - both in form and what it contains and what you think. Well, you tipped in a lot and you digested a lot - it wasn't pre-digested in your view. And it changed what you thought and how you see things.

The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.

observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.

Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.