Quotes About London

I was every Londoner's stereotypical idea of a brash, vulgar American. When I got here, it turned out that London was the Wild West, and New York was like London at the height of the Victorian era, in which everyone was far more obsessed with table manners and status-climbing than they are in London. In London, everyone was just crawling over this blizzard of cocaine. Here, if you have more than a glass of wine with your meal, people refer you to Alcoholics Anonymous.

I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.

London Fashion Week is so different from any of the others. Compared to the strictness in New York, London seems freer from commercial constraints. Truer to the process, to street style, to a sense of humour.

Famously in 1936, Oswald Mosley led a march of his British black shirts through a mostly Jewish neighborhood, in the east end of London. What resulted was what they called the "Battle of Cable Street", where Oswald Mosley and his fascists basically got the snot beaten out of them when East London rose up against them and beat them up.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the sheer overwhelming dominance of London makes it extremely for provincial cities to develop more than a very restricted financial function. London, in that sense, is akin to the notorious upas tree, a fabulous Javanese tree so poisonous that it destroys all life for many miles around itself.

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.

I've always been a city person - London boy - and New York is just incredible. It has what London has but almost more in terms of variety, culture, social life, everything. I just like walking the streets and feeling the energy and the vibe.

And I remember that about three years before that, her first record had come out. And I just remember really liking this one song off it called "In My Bed" and being a little bit enamored. This, you know, this young kind of Jewish girl from North London, you know, I have the same thing - from a Jewish family from North London - with this incredible voice.

I was born in England and brought up in London. When I was 18 I read a book and came across the Dharma. I was halfway through the book when I turned to my mother and said, "I'm a Buddhist," to which she replied, "Oh are you dear? Well finish the book and then you can tell me about it." I realised I'd always been Buddhist but I just hadn't known it existed, because in those days not even the word 'Buddha' was ever spoken. This was in in the 1960s, so there wasn't that much available, even in London.

When I was a little kid it was my dream to go to drama school, but it was never something I thought would happen to me. I was a Jewish girl from North London and things like that don't happen to Jewish girls from North London called Amy Winehouse.

I think I got into acting because I kind of had not much else to do! I guess I was kind of looking for something challenging. I heard about the London Theater scene and it was very different from the upbringing that I had and it felt like a challenge. And the whole sort of London Theater schools, I was told that 6,000 apply and there are like 30 accepted to each one. I was like, "Yeah. Let's see if we can do that!"

I consider myself extremely lucky to have been born and raised in London, and to have had on my doorstep this most fascinating of cities with so many relics of 2000 years of history still to be found in its streets. One of my greatest pleasures was, and still is, exploring London.

London is the clearing-house of the world.

Like a lot of small press founders I was looking for a way into publishing - as well as a way out of academia. Without moving to London, I couldn't see a way of working for a publishing house whose work I liked. Believe it or not, the simplest way for me to get into publishing was to start my own press.

I was very aggressive as a child. At primary school in London my attitude was 'If you don't do what I say, I'll knowk you out', and I was eventually expelled for fighting.

Well it's a gloomy, rainy old day to be here in London, but it could be worse; I could be in Saudi Arabia where men are men, and women are cattle.

Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.

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.

And I had known Peter O'Toole before in London. And I'd liked him very much. And the thought of being in a picture with him was very challenging to me. And he was playing the starring role.

The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But destructive influences which can be compared to causes of illness like these are never lacking in the history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from the visitations of an enemy.

At an age when most youngsters are preparing for their GCSEs, I was suddenly a jet-setter, briefly the toast of Hollywood and London's West End. My immature wishes and naive opinions were treated with respect.

Commuting in a wheelchair is not easy. I live in a very old part of Rome. These cobbles everywhere... terrible! In London, it is the same. Every pavement is uneven.

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'm very moved and very excited. And it just seems to me here are houses and trees and streets that feel so different from New York. I feel very attached to London; I love it.

I don't think I'd live in London unless you paid me. Nine figures would be nice.

I'm a London lad, but I'm fascinated by America. I want to take a motorcycling trip across the country and see those wide open spaces.

London has now become almost like a gigantic frog! With its long tongue it draws curious insects from all over the world inside itself!

I cannot love people in the country, I discover, because there is always this danger that they may be acquaintances, with all the perils and choleras of acquaintance implicit in them; but in London they seem as charming as rabbits.

There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London.

We would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.

You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else.

The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But, when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals.

Many years ago, we were only able to build boxes. Today, architects from all over the world are working with us - Zaha Hadid from London, Gerkan, Marg and Partner from Hamburg, Kengo Kuma from Japan. We brought design and digitalization from abroad to China.

I like the little bit of distance that London affords me and I like living in a world capital. I like having the culture at my fingertips.

In a way, Che Guevara's fate was far worse than Simon Bolivar's. Guevara's collapse was complete: his intentions were forgotten, but his style was taken up by boutique owners (one of the fanciest clothes stores in London is called Che Guevara). There is no faster way of destroying a man or mocking his ideas than making him fashionable. That Che succeeded in influencing dress-designers was part of his tragedy.

I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging.

In the early '60s there was very little reliable information on Tibetan Buddhism. I was living in London and I had joined the Buddhist Society. For the most part, people there were either interested in Theravada or Zen Buddhism. There was almost no one into Tibetan Buddhism at that time.

I THINK IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE CONVENTIONALLY ROMANTIC YOU'VE GOT TO GO ALL THE WAY: A BEAUTIFUL DINNER SOMEWHERE LOVELY, WITH BOAT-LOADS OF FLOWERS, CHOCOLATES AND CHAMPAGNE. BUT IT MIGHT ALSO BE NICE TO WRAP UP WARM AND SIT ON A ROOF SOMEWHERE, WITH A CUP OF HOT SOUP AND YOUR GIRL, WATCH THE PLANES COME IN OVER LONDON AND LISTEN TO THE NIGHT.

England is my home. London is my home. New York feels like, if I have to spend a year living in an unfamiliar city, this is a pretty lovely one to spend a year in, but I will be going home at the end of it, certainly.

I move countries every three or four years. I was born in London, and we lived in Canada. Then we lived in Saudi Arabia until the Gulf War broke out, when we were forced to leave. Then we hop-scotched for a while from Holland back to Canada back to Saudi Arabia. Then there was D-day, so we had to get out again.

Yet while on my trip to the Middle East, the London bombings occurred. This was yet another stark reminder that if we don't fight terrorists abroad, they just get closer to our home.

By bringing Little Sun to Tate Modern and the London Olympics, I hope to realise an art project for those who typically have no access to global events of this scale.

I love London, I love the British people.

I don't care very much for literary shrines and hauntsI knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the windows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle's yard. And when I said, "Why throw a stone into Carlyle's yard?" she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject.

On March 4th, 1830, I arrived in London, where a new world seemed opened to me.

Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the purpose for which the Count had left the theatre. His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all question the preliminary only to his escape from London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm-I felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the brand; and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on his conscience-I had seen it in his recognition of Pesca.

If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we say bitter things in a sweet voice: we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces.

I think I was the first executive to ever speak at a Greenpeace business conference, in London in 2001. That didn't play well here at Ford, but I thought it was an important signal to send internally, that these were the kind of issues we needed to be grappling with.