Quotes About London

I arrived in Tokyo in around '81. Around that time, I visited London for about two months - it was the period just before Malcolm McLaren released his solo album Duck Rock. I'd met him when he came to Japan, so I visited him in London and spent one evening with him and his girlfriend over at his house. He told me, "London is boring right now. You should go to New York." So he called a friend in New York, who I think was an old assistant or someone who helped him record early hip-hop stuff over there.

I felt very special in Paris, more special than I felt in London. I love London for different reasons. I've always been close to London, being English. But somehow there's something special about living as an Englishwoman in Paris.

They had bombed London, whether on purpose or not, and the British people and London especially should know that we could hit back. It would be good for the morale of us all.

It is almost impossible to open a newspaper without reading something about the London housing market. House prices are rising at such a rate that the vast majority of Londoners can't afford to buy, are being forced out of the boroughs they grew up in, or in the worst cases, are being made homeless. If nothing is done, people will continue to be driven out of the city and London will cease to be a hub for creativity and entrepreneurship.

I studied music all the way through college, but as soon as I graduated from university, I got straight into London and got straight into film music. So really my experiences have been being around the orchestras in London and being around the people who work in film music.

My favourite restaurant of all time is Mildreds on London's Lexington Street. It's a little vegetarian restaurant and is really fun and healthy, too. It was the first place I went to in London and really liked. That was 20 years ago, and it is still my favourite.

Madrid is not as big as London, but it is true when you are coming from a big city like Madrid, nothing is going to surprise you, and I am very happy to move to a city like London. It is a big city, and you can do everything you want with the respect that the English people always have.

Although I have lived in London, I have never really considered London my home because it was always going to be a stopping-off point for me, and it has been too.

In London, people can be so... well, it's not even a case of people being unkind or unfriendly. You just don't make any contact in London. You go from A to B with your eyes on the pavement.

Not part of any London combination and you have to go a long way from London really to... to throw that feeling off. So, it's right and fitting that the Beatles came from Liverpool. If they hadn't, I wouldn't have got involved. It wouldn't have interested me. And they wouldn't have hired me.

Lamplighters are the guys who manually turned on all the street lamps in London and turned them off. That was the gig in the 1930s in London.

The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

I don't like flying at the best of times. And as I get older, I like it less and less. I don't much like driving, either. I prefer to be driven. And, when I'm in London, I don't even like walking on the street. I can never get used to looking the right way when I cross the street.

The one enemy in the world that America has is England. But then, England is the great land of Christian civilization, and it may not be a thing to be much wondered at that our Americans whom we send to represent us in London become in a short time somewhat civilized, and learn to love those who hate them, bless those that curse them, and do good to those that persecute and calumniate them.

My earliest musical memory was getting to watch my dad play drums in a local band. He's a banker by trade, but a drummer at heart. I remember seeing the guitar player do the solo from "Werewolves of London" with his teeth, and that was the moment that had me hooked.

It is white. - when asked what the White house was like by a student in East London

In 1998, I was trained by the SPLA [Sudanese People's Liberation Army ] in London how to pretend to be a geologist.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and I've made movies all over the world... I've been in New York, Norway, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, London - I've been in all these cities, shooting away in the winter, thinking, 'People who choose to live here are insane.

I wrote a mad, passionate letter to the best restaurant in the UK, Le Gavroche in London, and asked if I could work for them. They gave me a job as a dishwasher (Colin laughs). For me that was a joy because I had a foot in the door of this world class restaurant. Just being around the buzz and the pots and pans and the wonderful food and all this produce that was coming in, that was the start of Paul Rankin the chef.

I've missed London so much for its fashion. No disrespect to the girls in Manchester, but some really do look like clones - there's a lot of hair extensions and fake tans. You're free to experiment down here.

I'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston.

An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.

I went to comprehensive school in North London and left without any qualifications [diploma]. And I was doing bits of acting and improv in a drama club in the evenings. Then I discovered you didn't need qualifications to go to art school, you just needed a body of work.

When we were negotiating the ongoing financial period in 2013, I talked myself hoarse. London and Berlin in particular insisted on reducing the budget. So we - to the applause of German journalists - made cuts to central future-oriented areas and slashed the budget for development aid, research and technology.

I don't live in Ireland, I live in London with my girlfriend; and it's because of the globalization of our planet, it's not necessary to live in Los Angeles to be a successful and any country is just an airplane ride away. If there's a director who wants to meet me or if there's something I have to do, I can just hop on an airplane - the world's small now.

If I was courting the Muslim vote, I wouldn't have put establishing the partnership ceremony at the forefront of my first term, would I? I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.

I hate going out in Brighton now. It's different in London. People respect you more there.

I love going to London for a couple of days but I need to be in the country. I like the silence, the smell and the seasonal changes, especially in spring and summer. I really feel that I belong there.

You know obviously a big TV or film break would be lovely, but I find that I’m essentially a theatre trained actor and that’s what I love doing. I love fringe theatres in London, I love theatres like the Royal Court, Soho and the National obviously and if I could work in any of those and be a jobbing actor for a while then I’m very lucky.

I don't think there's any money to be made doing something that's that contemporary without having a spin on it. If there's a London riots film with zombies, that'd have more chance.

I'm always willing to work that little bit harder to achieve what I need to achieve because I feel like it's a blessing for me to be here. I was never supposed to be here. I'm the black council estate kid, single parent, from West London, with friends that are in jail, friends that have committed heinous crimes, friends that are doing nothing. I'm not supposed to be here, therefore I have nothing to lose. I'm always going to work harder than everyone else because if it doesn't work, "So what?".

I feel comfortable in places like London. You get many cultures in L.A. but it's strangely segregated.

London is a dead duck, as far as innovative new music is concerned, unless you want to have your head blown off with some outrageous, rubbish, pounding dance music.

I crammed my exams in London and did fine.

I'm gonna start off somewhere small like London or England.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. ... It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

I have to admit, I am aware of my Latin roots now. In the past, people couldn't place me. They thought that I was Danish or English or French. They never got that I am Italian. I'm not typical, maybe because my visual education was very mixed. There was a lot of London in my aesthetic: The Face, i-D, British music, and a lot of British fashion . . . But I really enjoy this contrast. I can go from Lady Gaga to Brian Eno in a split second.

They do it in Thai restaurants in London. You ask for a drink, and it comes in a glass with loads of seaweed and pebbles in it like a scene from Finding Nemo.

It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this." I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself. "Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea." "The board-schools." "Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.

When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.

It felt [at the Allied set] like, "At last, I'm in Hollywood," even though I was in West London. It was like, "This is how a film should be made." It was beautiful.

You ask why London has to 'stand for' anything. One response is that in fact it always inevitably does. One could say at the moment it stands for a complex mix of multiculturalism and financial power. Interestingly, that is a political mix of progressive and oppressive. What I'm arguing is simply that we should take responsibility for the effects of 'our place' around the world. To take responsibility for our embeddedness. If you don't want to, so be it. It does demand an imaginative engagement with our planetary interdependence and that can be quite challenging.

I don't think taste is about money. As your career develops, you're able to decide what to spend your money on. I live in a really small apartment in London, and that's a choice. I live at The Carlyle in New York, but it's not big. It's about making choices of style over flashiness. People's style is subjective and mine happens to be around the classical because I feel comfortable with that, and because of my background. I'm probably living in the wrong time. I should have lived in the Thirties or the Fifties.

As a student in London, I had seen so many shows, so many plays and had seen so many greats of the day.

The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.

The monster London laugh at me.