David Lyons Quotes

My first year in L.A. I felt lost in that big city. It's easy to be tumbled around and not figure out where you fit in even when you find your little niche.

I moved to Los Angeles when I was 20 years old and was absolutely terrified. I grew up in a small town, so the city itself scared me. I initially did not plan on staying but fell in love with it and never went home.

I am starting to like L.A., but the concept of a place you have to get used to so much seems a little weird to me. I have been to many foreign cities where I didn't have to acclimatize as much as I did to L.A.

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

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 never thought anything was strange in Puerto Rico other than the big mosquitos; because I was born there, nothing was really foreign to me. I think what I saw strange coming to L.A. was that a lot of people are a little bit two-faced. In Puerto Rico, you don't get that.

I was just a bumpkin. Just a country bumpkin. I had just come to New York from Virginia. Or was it Baltimore?

When you arrive in L.A. as an Englishman, you might as well be on the moon. People just don't understand you if you speak too fast, and most people there think you're Australian. Ordering was incredibly complicated. I was speechless.

I now know my right from my left and my up from my down. Unluckily, my terrible sense of direction remains. For me, to live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never ever make a smooth entrance, always to get caught looking lost on the street.

I live in L.A., I grew up here, it's not that crazy for me because it's L.A., you know?

I describe my years in Los Angeles as 12 years of culture shock.

I grew up in the Midwest and never really felt at home there, and when I got to New York, I was really fearless. I feel like I really fell in love with the the place. But then, it's a place where your world is really big at first and then becomes really small. I found myself hardly leaving my neighborhood, like I made it into a small town.

L.A. is a great city to get lost in. The best thing to do is to drive in any direction, find a strip mall, and go from one store to the next. I guarantee you will see a collision of cultures you never imagined.

It's difficult to adapt to Barcelona.

I'd never thought about living in London until about 1999.

The need to express yourself in Los Angeles makes the city so vibrant. If I lived here, it would be lovely to be in a cool new high-rise looking out over a city that is exploding.

I think there's a difference between somebody who grows up in Paris or London and goes to Los Angeles. But if you grow up in the green fields, and you rarely go into the city, you're so overprotected that when you do go to L.A., it's almost a bigger slap in the head.

I went to public school in L.A., so I felt like I'd been in a coma for three years. I woke up, and moved to New York.

New York seems very very foreign to me, like more foreign than almost anywhere in America, and almost anywhere in the world, I find it like one of the most overwhelming places.

When I was in L.A., I thought I would never leave.

When I fifteen or sixteen and was in London, moving from a small town and now going to a big city, I discovered so much new music. Finding all of that music and being inspired that much all at once, that was the benefit of being from a small place.

I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around.

As a transplanted northerner, London has always signified big-city glamour and cosmopolitanism. It's part of what drew me here after university.

I grew up without a television, so when I went to L.A., it was sort of, you know, a lot to take in, but it actually suited me more than where I was from, so I sort of had that 'home away from home' feeling, and L.A. is definitely home now.

I really tried to avoid living in L.A. for as long as I can.