Jonathan Raban Quotes

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• At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?

  Jonathan Raban

  Night, Cities, Numbers

  "In Seattle with Jonathan Raban" by Mike Hodgkinson, www.theguardian.com. May 14, 2008.

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• We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

  Jonathan Raban

  Unique, Assessment, Self

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.181, Pan Macmillan

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• Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

  Jonathan Raban

  Travel, Book, Journey

  Jonathan Raban (1987). “For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987”

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• Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.

  Jonathan Raban

  Distance, Reality, Scary

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• Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.

  Jonathan Raban

  Verbs, Sake, Destination

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• The mythical America?that marvellous, heroic, sentimental landwas an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer's leap over the rude facts at your feet.

  Jonathan Raban

  America, Feet, Rude

  1990 HuntingMister Heartbreak, ch.2.

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• Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

  Jonathan Raban

  Presidential, Bars, Prose

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.462, Pan Macmillan

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• Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

  Jonathan Raban

  Art, Thinking, Soul

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• Good travel books are novels at heart.

  Jonathan Raban

  Book, Heart, Novel

  Recalled by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the NewYorkTimes, 26 Jan1987, reviewing Raban's novel Coasting (1986).

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• In rural areas the majority of the victims of violent crime know their assailants (indeed, are probably married to them); in cities, the killer and the mugger come out of the anonymous dark, their faces unrecognized, their motives obscure.

  Jonathan Raban

  Dark, Cities, Rural Areas

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.13, Pan Macmillan

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• In the city one clings to nostalgic and unreal signs of community, takes forced refuge in codes, badges and coteries; the city's life, of surfaces and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence.

  Jonathan Raban

  Cities, Community, Nostalgic

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• Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

  Jonathan Raban

  Art, Real, Men

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• One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.

  Jonathan Raban

  Drama, Fall, Eden

  Jonathan Raban (1992). “For Love and Money: A Writing Life”, Perennial

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• I've taught the better class of tourist both to see and not to see; to lift their eyes above and beyond the inessentials, and thrill to our western Nature in her majesty.

  Jonathan Raban

  Eye, Class, Thrill

  "Looking Together: Writers on Art". Book by Rebecca Brown and Mary Jane Knecht, April 30, 2009.

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• It always seems to me odd to call a place a wilderness when every wilderness area in the US bristles with rules and regulations as to how you can behave, what you're allowed to do, and is patrolled by armed rangers enforcing the small print. They're parks, of course, not wildernesses at all.

  Jonathan Raban

  Rules And Regulations, Parks, Odd

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• In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

  Jonathan Raban

  Moving, Clothes, Cities

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.40, Pan Macmillan

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• Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.

  Jonathan Raban

  White, House, President

  "'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual'" by Jonathan Raban, www.theguardian.com. November 7, 2008.

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• Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.

  Jonathan Raban

  Sea, Cities, Mud

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.16, Pan Macmillan

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• To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects.

  Jonathan Raban

  Cities, Details, Chaos

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.51, Pan Macmillan

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• Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue in the American, not the British, sense as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously polite.

  Jonathan Raban

  Cities, Blue, Manners

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.378, Pan Macmillan

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• Simply as a writer of books I'm thrilled and proud that Seattle should have raised, on a public vote, sufficient money to build a central library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the city: 28 of them.

  Jonathan Raban

  Book, Cities, Should Have

  "In Seattle with Jonathan Raban" by Mike Hodgkinson, www.theguardian.com. May 14, 2008.

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• The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography, 'Why Not the Best?,' published in 1975.

  Jonathan Raban

  Dream, Father, Book

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.464, Pan Macmillan

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• It's been so long since a talented writer last occupied the White House; no wonder, then, that American writers have been among the most prominent of all the demographic groups claiming a piece of Barack Obama for themselves.

  Jonathan Raban

  White, Long, House

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.462, Pan Macmillan

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• 'Rage' is the word that most often attaches itself to the Tea Party movement, and it's true that, from the outside looking in, their public demonstrations appear to be more enraged than any political events in America since the race riots and anti-war protests of the 1960s.

  Jonathan Raban

  War, Party, Race Riots

  "Sipping with the Tea Party" by Jonathan Raban, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2010.

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• Trouble defies the law of gravity. It's easier to pick up than to drop.

  Jonathan Raban

  Law, Trouble, Easier

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