Most big cities like London and Glasgow have great big rivers that are unmissable. What's brilliant about the Water of Leith is that it's so hidden. It's a secret.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

Big cities do evoke a sense of menace.

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.

Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities.

I used to walk in the Bowery in the early 1980s, and it was not safe. It went from this to Disneyland under Giuliani and Bloomberg. This is now one of the best-run big cities in the world.