James Frey Quotes

Los Angeles is many places in one place.

I love, love writing about Los Angeles. I love exploring every part of it. And I find, rather than a burden, it's actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing process for me. I love everything about L.A. Okay, not the traffic. But I love the way it looks. I love the geography. I love the diversity.

I just love the sheer mess of New York.

New York is like the weirdest city in the United States, in a great way, and Los Angeles is probably more similar to most of America.

L.A. is still such a fascinating place to me, so big and diverse. It's so spread out that you can go from Zuma to downtown and there's really like 10 different towns in between.

L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.

There is a tremendous human variety that manages to squeeze itself into this narrow piece of land and live side by side--in the same city, but on different planets

For me, God's country is sirens and subways and all kinds of ethnic groups trying to cross the street all at once.

Pittsburgh was a wonderful place to grow up - diverse and complex, one could go from one culture to a completely different one in just a few blocks. It was a whole world in one city.

I would describe Los Angeles as actually not having taste. In New York, there's taste. But you have to remember that taste is censorship. It's a form of restriction.

In L.A., you tend to see a lot of people do very bizarre things. I love it.

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

Well, there's nothing strange about Americans as a whole. But, Angelinos are different!

What I love about New York is that everyone is in their own world. It's the opposite of L.A. - there, everyone is looking outside of themselves to see who's next to them. What's great about New York is that you get to be anonymous.

Every person on the streets of New York is a type. The city is one big theater where everyone is on display.

Los Angeles is a very special city. It's a great ethnic mix, a great cultural mix.

The thing about Mumbai is you go five yards and all of human existence is revealed. It's an incredible cavalcade of life, and I love that.

I think Los Angeles is often portrayed as kind of a petri dish, where bad decisions start and then spread to the rest of the world. I don't see it that way. I feel Los Angeles is a place of almost primal struggle and survival. It's not a city that embraces its inhabitants.

L.A. is a constellation of microclimates and microcosms, a library with dozens of special collections. A 20-minute drive can bring a temperature change of 15 degrees. Crossing an intersection can feel like crossing a national border.

People drive everywhere in L.A., so you get very little human interaction... but N.Y. and Chicago are like London... L.A. lacks the social interaction.

In New York, Kid Carter was pure vanilla for a city with stronger tastes.

New York is this cacophony - a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.

I feel comfortable in places like London. You get many cultures in L.A. but it's strangely segregated.

London is a modern Babylon.

L.A. is a bit strange. It doesn't seem like the real world.