Quotes About London

I think one of the London Film Festival strengths is that it's set in London but it's not about London. It's about the diversity of this city and it's about world cinema. And that's what London is - London is a place where its identity is always in a state of flux. So, this festival celebrates the way in which it is always changing. That's why London is a fascinating place and that's why the film festival is a fascinating film festival.

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.

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.

In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.

Our hearts and prayers go out to the people in London and in Egypt. We're very concerned about it. We are providing our expertise to aid in the investigation in London.

London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.

I was born in London and raised in Rome until I was 4. Then we went back to London, where I went to school.

I wanted to become an actor. I went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which is one of the main drama schools in London where you go when you are older. But I was doing the junior one when I was a kid. And some friends there had agents. I was fourteen and I was like, "I want an agent! It sounds awesome!" I had no idea what that was. I thought those guys looked like men in black. They were hanging around in suits all the time. So I luckily got a very good agent in London and started auditioning. And then when I was 16, I got my first film and I've been working ever since.

I was always a sports nut but I've lost interest now in whether one bunch of mercenaries in north London is going to beat another bunch of mercenaries from west London.

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.

People constantly make the mistake of comparing London with New York, Milan and Paris and that's not what it's about. London has its own fashion identity. You come here to find the next Alexander McQueen or John Galliano.

In England everything is liberalised. Within certain boundaries and rules everybody can do what he likes. Maybe London's society has a different tempo, a different dynamic. London is fast, productive, creative but it is not England. If you want to transfer that to football, you could say: in the four big English clubs and maybe in the one or two behind them there is a top level. Everything that comes after that rather mirrors English society. It's honest, fair and hard, sometimes also fast, but not always so perfect.

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.

I grew up in London. My parents and I lived in West Norwood, then we moved to Norbury, and I went to the Brit School. I'm a South London girl at heart.

The mayors fund for London will be a streamlined vehicle for getting money from the wealth creating sector to communities across London that are facing hardship and deprivation and are the victims of crime.

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

If they were going to go to London or to the UK to find out how health care is, national health care doesn't work, all they have to do is go to the Soviet Union to find out how communism and socialism didn't work, but it hasn't dissuaded them from trying it here because they think the only thing that hasn't happened is the right people haven't tried it with the proper funding.

Dad was the first man I fell in love with. He was a very funny man. He grew up in the East End of London and was very dynamic, and I understood why my mother fell in love with him.

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

I think American Werewolf in London is the greatest werewolf movie of all time.

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 2012 Olympics is going to cost £8 billion which is a lot of money. It'll probably bankrupt London. But you can't put a price on two bronze medals in cycling.

London, how could one ever be tired of it?

I started in theatre. I was at Cleveland and I went to London for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.

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.

If someone walked along any high street anywhere in London, and probably anywhere in the country, and looked into a letting agency, they would see a sign saying, 'No benefits here.' In other words, anyone in receipt of a state benefit is not allowed to apply for a private rented flat from that agent.

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

London is one of the few cities where people still dress properly and fashion exists. Every day I see women who've thought about their outfits. They've picked out the bag, put on proper shoes. ... Do you know how rare it is in parts of America to actually see 'an outfit'? France? I don't want to be anti-French but there isn't a more unattractive group of people on the streets.

I first came to London as a musician, and when my group broke up, I did 'Guys and Dolls' at the Watford Palace theatre. After that, Ned Sherrin found me and brought me to the West End to do one of his shows. The work went from strength to strength, so I thought: 'This is where the world wants me; I'll stay.

I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course

...Dean Mohamet, a Muslim landowner from Patna who had followed his British patron to Ireland. There he soon eloped with, and later marries, Jean Daly, from a leading Anglo-Irish family.... In 1807 Dean Mohamet moved to London where he opened the country's first Indian owned curry restaurant, Dean Mohamet's Hindoostanee Coffee House :...He finally decamped to Brighton where he opened what can only be described as Britain's first oriental massage parlour and became "Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV. "

The things that prey on my mind in London seem to disappear as soon as I find myself in a different environment. Survival mode kicks in.

Yes, Hackney has got more expensive, but so has rest of London

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.

The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.

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'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?".

The whole scale and scope of the decorating and fashion business in this country are incomparably grander than in London. Whats thrilling about America in general, and the New York fashion scene in particular, is its optimism. It makes the whole experience energizing and uplifting.

Commuter trains are the easiest target for terrorists, as we have seen in Madrid, London, and now Bombay. But it is difficult for a Westerner to comprehend the kind of overcrowding in a Bombay local train; they ferry six million passengers a day. A bomb that goes off in one of those compartments will have maximum impact.

I grew up near King's Cross station in London, living in an apartment block where my dad was a caretaker.

To have been selected to represent Team South Africa at the London 2012 Olympic Games in the individual 400m and the 4x400m relay is a real honor and I am so pleased that years of hard work, determination and sacrifice have all come together.

Ever since I was little it was programmed into me that London is where great theatre occurs and all the big shows you love start there.

The space and light up there in Norfolk is wonderfully peaceful. I find myself doing funny things like gardening, and cooking, which I rarely do in London.

Bernard [Leach] had acquired many [Shoji] Hamada works. Some of them, it was interesting - first of all, Hamada worked in St. Ives for about four years before returning to Japan to start his own pottery. He had exhibitions in London, and if these exhibitions didn't sell out, the galleries were instructed to send the remaining work down to the Leach Pottery, where they would go into the showroom for sale. If Bernard saw one that hadn't sold that he really admired, then he would take it (he would buy it), and it would go into the house.

I cook. I go to farmers markets in London and cook really good sort of organic foods.

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.

In London, it's hard for me to wear anything more colorful than black. When I'm in Rome, I dress up in white. When I'm in Paris, I became a Parisian. Striped T-shirt, Chanel. It's funny!