James Frey Quotes

New York and Los Angeles are really one city, and the rest of the country is America.

I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.

Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.

Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.

Charlotte, it's what somebody from New York or L.A. would say is a small town, but it isn't. It's right in between being a small town and a city. It's more of a city.

I'm not the first person to talk about this, but L.A. is just sort of a weird city because it's just a bunch of little towns put together under the umbrella of L.A. So people feel disconnected from each other and far apart, and in a relationship, that can also be a thing.

I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don't entirely want in their lives.

For people of the younger generation, the 21st century has started for them with a positive sign that Valencia is and will continue to be a very modern city.

Happy World Poetry Day: 'The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

Perhaps the most typically American place in America.

Los Angeles is a sophisticated city; it has no eccentricities and no heart.

And he [Louis Brandeis] talks to his young acolyte, Horace Kallen, who wrote this beautiful book called Cultural Pluralism, and he comes to believe that by being better Jews, or better members of our ethnic group, we can be better Americans, because America is like an orchestra in which identity is defined by the diversity of perspectives that we bring to the table.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation

I'm not from Indianapolis, but I like living in Indianapolis. If I were to explain it, I'd tell someone to imagine a city that perfectly captures the best and the worst of America. Imagine the truly American city, because that's what it is.

I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this "diversity" claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.