We've got a [Canadian] prime minister who seems to be intent on destroying our health system and education system. But I have gotten a thicker skin. I can get angry about these things without feeling like vomiting, if you know what I mean.

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.

But look what we have built ... This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

Maybe part of my animus against the English is the way they have always treated the Irish and they way they still think about the Irish.

Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.