Tom Stoppard Quotes

I like L.A., but I'm definitely a Brooklyn girl; I'm a city girl. I need the cars honking. I need the bright lights. I need people yelling in the middle of the night screaming at each other. I need all of that.

L.A. is such a big city, and there's so much going on. I mean, you know you're in L.A. when you can just hear sirens all the time.

I miss the noise in New York: the sound of taxis and that constant buzz the city has.

I live in a flat in central London. I do like it there; there's always stuff going on. But I do crave a bit of peace and quiet.

When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.

I went to New York for the first time when I was in college for a school trip and, uh, it did not appeal to me. It was too much hustle and bustle.

How real can your music be if you wake up in the morning hearing birds and crickets? I never hear birds when I wake up. Just a lot of construction work, the smell of Chinese takeout, children screaming, and everybody knocking a different track from 'Ready to Die' as they pass down the street.

I come from New York. It's busy. It's populated. It's noisy. It's loud.

L.A.'s a lot of noise and stuff. You always hear cars and stuff.

I go down the street thinking, 'Oh my God, I live in New York.' But then I think, 'Oh my God, I'm on Broadway!'

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-coloured bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.

There are ... just two kinds of girls. Those who go down town Saturday nights, and those who don't.

In New York people don't go to the theatre - they go to see hits.

I come from New York where, if you fall down, someone will pick you up by your wallet.

Today coming to work, I saw one of those only in New York scenes. It was a rat who had passed out after choking on a pretzel.

I guess I probably took New York for granted. Growing up, playing in the street, going down to the Avenue to the record store and to the grocery store and stuff like that.

America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"--that's what they sing.

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.