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.

When I moved to London, you could park your motorcycle in the pavement, on the sidewalk. We would stay here and just leave it and go about your business. But now something was sort of encroaching in London. There's cameras everywhere. You can't do anything. You're not allowed to be in a group.

London life was very full and exciting [...] But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray.

I came to London when I was a year and a half for four years. Since then I have been back and forth. I do mostly feel like a Londoner: I enjoy the Angle-Saxon acceptance of difference and I feel it's more of an integrated society than most places. But this is in London, not the rest of the UK.

I started going back and forth, New York, London, New York, London. I wasn't looking back at all. I was doing tons of jobs. Working, working, working, working.

My family comes from New Zealand, but I'm a London girl. I was born and raised in London, but I've got the blood of a New Zealander, so I always kind of felt like I didn't belong - in a good way.

If I had the choice I would live in London. There are a few things I don't like about England but its just details, I don't really think about them but I really like England and I really like London.

Many of my favourite hotels are in London. I like the Covent Garden Hotel and I stayed at Blakes last time I was in London. I like the feeling of warmth and homeliness that you get from both of those places.

Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

I spent two years living in London - I'd have stayed for ever if I could have got a work visa. It was there I started collecting vinyl and fell in love with the sounds of the 1970s.

To play today in London, next week in Madrid and the week after that in Warsaw is a bit better than playing Newark and Baltimore and Philadelphia. I've been doing that for 20 years.

I have a driver in London because I am slightly dyslexic and cannot drive in the U.K.; after all, the traffic runs the opposite way to that in the United States.

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.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

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.

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.

Sometimes I miss the spirit of London, but it's a very gray place.

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

It is to create the best Games the world has ever seen by unlocking the UK's unrivalled passion for sport, by delivering the best Games for athletes to compete in, by showcasing London's unmatched cultural wealth and diversity and by creating a real and lasting legacy.

Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought or gesture. They do not dwell or stay atall. Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret which perplexes them, and puts them out.

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.

[London is] one of the best cities in the world. There is just so much culture there and so much history and so much diversity. It's just a perfect place to grow up. I studied at the Guildhall every Saturday so I'd always be in town every weekend doing that. I was kind of a city boy really.

I understand that artists and critics make a big deal over the Grammys. But when I go to my shows and I'm selling out arenas in London, and when I'm in Australia and Japan, there aren't any Grammys there. There are human beings who I've touched. There are human beings who are inspired by me, who I love dearly. And that's what my career is based on.

London is like a girlfriend I loved, then really fell out with.

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

RESPIRATOR, n. An apparatus fitted over the nose and mouth of an inhabitant of London, whereby to filter the visible universe in its passage to the lungs.

Vicars, MPS and lawyers were amont those who considered me to be the best hostess in London.

Life in the [London] suburb is richer at the lower levels. At these levels the people are not self-conscious at all, they are at liberty to be as eccentric as they please, they do not know that they are eccentric.

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.

My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there - I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen's butler.

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.

The original Return of the Living Dead, I was attached to direct it, and I wrote the story. Production was delayed. In the meantime I went to London to do Lifeforce.

I was about 16 when punk started to happen. It was so exciting. You had a social depression going on in the U.K. There was a sanitation strike. London was really grim, gray. You had Margaret Thatcher coming in. It was a really revolutionary time.

Judging from the way they sat and goggled at the drag on the stage it was obvious that they were indulging in delightful fantasies that brought to them substantial memories of the girls they had left behind in London or Manchester. As the Quartermaster Captain lisped after performing before a particularly rapt audience: 'I bet there were more standing pricks than snotty noses tonight'. Astonishingly, I suspect he was right. We probably helped to keep the home fires of passion burning.

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.

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.

The Globe' is one of the most terrifying theatres in London. It's that mob element - everyone packed in and staring up at you.

There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.

My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.

A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a fools-cap crown On a fool's head - and there is London Town.

Will remembered the two of them, running through the dark streets of London, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, seraph blades gleaming in their hands; hours in the training room, shoving each other into mud puddles, throwing snowballs at Jessamine from behind an ice fort in the courtyard, asleep like puppies on the rug in front of the fire.

Journalists go to press briefings at the Ministry of Defense in London or the Pentagon in Washington, and no critical questions are posed at all. It's just a news-gathering operation, and the fact that the news is being given by governments who are waging war doesn't seem to worry many journalists too much.

I do notice that when I've been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.

In London, Washington, and Paris, people talk of bonuses or no bonuses. In parts of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food.

Outside of London especially, I can't go anywhere without people buying me a drink. There are quite a lot of people who know me from The Vicar Of Dibley and are big Dibley fans, but they don't have things to shout at me from that show.

We've only recently turned the corner on the Sept. 11 attacks being blamed on Jews and Israelis, as well as almost every other terrorist attack, whether in London, Madrid, Bali or Egypt.