Quote

I get absolutely ruthless in my own way about not doing anything else when I am trying to concentrate on writing a book. I have to stick to it and concentrate.

Jane Jacobs

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jane Jacobs
Age: 89 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 4
Died: 2006
Died: April 25
Author
Economist
Journalist
Sociologist
Urban Planner
Writer
Scranton
Pennsylvania
Jane Butzner
Jane Butzner Jacobs
Else
Anything
Book
Writing
Ruthless
Trying
Concentrate
Way
Stick
Sticks
Absolutely

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

Image
It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.
Jane Jacobs
Image
To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
Jane Jacobs
Image
People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.
Jane Jacobs
Image
I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do, the better.
Jane Jacobs
Image
(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)
Jane Jacobs
Image
I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.
Jane Jacobs
Image
The best thing is not to think about [separatism]. [People in Alberta] don't even want to engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities. My new hypothesis shows why. But also in trading with each other they can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another.
Jane Jacobs
Image
The entrepreneurial investors of the time just want to repeat themselves indefinitely and don't know when to stop. You can't do that. And so finally the housing boom, or the auto boom, or whatever it is that's been carrying things along, runs out of customers.
Jane Jacobs
Image
As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
Jane Jacobs
Image
You don't get new products and services out of sameness.
Jane Jacobs
Image
When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.
Jane Jacobs
Image
I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Reactions [on my 1979 Massey lectures] were from Anglophones. I'm one. But I'm terrible at French. In fact, there was practically no reaction.
Jane Jacobs
Image
There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.
Jane Jacobs
Image
New ideas often need old buildings.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Nothing is so clear in history that is it happens for any one thing. It seems that a lot of things come together to make great changes.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
Jane Jacobs