Zubin Mehta Quotes

Nobody moves on purpose to Detroit.

I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute.

The New Orleans I knew ain't no more.

Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.

Detroit is a city that really stands out. It's been through a very difficult time. There's been a lot of pain here, and the city, physically, has suffered. You can see it in certain neighborhoods, and there's buildings downtown that have been abandoned.

There used to be an old bad joke. I hope it's not so much a good joke anymore. 'Everybody's from Scranton; no one's in Scranton.'

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

Well, 9/11 made me think about the towers, and the fact that I lived in New York for a long time, while they were being built. In fact, I had a studio that was ripped out, along with the whole neighborhood, to put the towers in. I saw them go up. I lived with them, running past them in the morning. And they were like part of my furniture.

Baltimore and Detroit - they are solid cities.

You can't fight the fact that Detroit is a de-industrializing market and it isn't facing dramatic, positive transformation.

Those who remember New York in the 1970s, as I do, look back on a city that had hit a very rough patch - decaying, bankrupt, and crime-ridden. But fun.

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a good job as a cartographer in a design studio where I had worked for about four months.

I've always liked lost, old New York.

I knew I wanted to be an actor for a long time, but I was based out of Chicago and then I went to New York and I did 'The Upright Citizens Brigade' out there. I had a two-man show with a guy named Oliver Ralli who's now in the band Pass Kontrol, which is a big band out of New York.

I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a '70s cop movie location; when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types.

As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

I love Columbus Circle. I rebelled against the construction for a while because I go back to the '70s. There was no Time Warner building. Now I've started to really like it.

I grew up in the Bronx, but in Riverdale - not exactly an area of New York that's known for being rough and tumble.

There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away.

A city built on rivers and bituminous coal, Pittsburgh in the '90s has survived the boom and bust years.

But I can tell you that the New York that I see now is not the New York that we grew up in. It's not 1973.

Being a Midwesterner, I know that many of the middle-class manufacturing jobs that had been at the heart of our economy are either gone or going, and they're not coming back.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.