Voltaire Quotes

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

Stress is real, and you never know what a person is going through behind the camera.

I suffer anxiety and a lot of insecurities, depression and stuff.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

I put enough pressure on myself already - I can sit here and work myself into an anxiety-filled breakdown without worrying what everyone else is going to think.

There is a dark side to being single in a great big city like New York. There's this sense of isolation and I think you can get fairly desperate.

I have a somewhat reclusive quality myself, and actually what's great about New York is that it pushes you to be social because the streets are full of people.

I have had anxiety literally my whole life.

Most of my world is in London, and I feel like this is where I went mad and ended up finding myself.

Anyone who lives in N.Y.C. will tell you that getting into a confrontation on a city street is a complete nightmare 100 percent of the time.

Often the people with the biggest smiles can be struggling the most.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

I'm a kid from New York, so urban life reflected into art and music was around me and accessible and tangible.

The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn't just the blues. It's not just like I have a hangover in the weekend ... the girl didn't show up or something like that. It isn't that. It's not really depression, it's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you're gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit.

Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.

I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You're dying.

Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

People in towns are always preoccupied. 'Have I missed the bus? Have I forgotten the potatoes? Can I get across the road?

There's something about urban life - you walk out your door, and you're in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it's very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.

Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time.

Not for nothing does the neurotic suffer - but not for anything very much, either.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.