Words to Drive By

"I don’t wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is you can make a right turn on a red light."
- Woody Allen on L.A.

"The freeway experience….is the only…secular communion Los Angeles has…Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over."
- Joan Didion

"Red lights flicker on every horizon, airplanes beware; cars flash by, more lights. Workers repair the gas main. Signs, signs, lights, lights, streets, streets."
- Neal Cassady

"Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations."
- P.J. O’Rourke

"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell of urban and suburban man."
- Marshall McLuhan

"Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated."
- Jean Baudrillard

"No other man-made device since the shields and lances of the ancient knights fulfills a man’s ego like an automobile."
- Sir William Rootes (British automobile manufacturer)