Barry McGee Quotes

The whole world is covered in graffiti. No one cares. It's just part of urban noise.

No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.

It's impossible to predict which paintings will last and which won't. In New Orleans I painted on a dilapidated shop in a street littered with abandoned cars and rotting mattresses, then two hours later the piece was gone. It turned out I'd picked the side of a crack house and the proprietor didn't like the attention.

The people are the city.

I'm not a New Yorker. I grew up in Detroit. A lot of people think it's one big city but they're completely different.

What is the city but the people?

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

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.

The shops in High Street still have their metal grilles down, blank-eyed and sleeping. My name is scrawled across them all. I'm outside Ajay's newsagent's. I'm on the expensive shutters of the health food store. I'm massive on Handie's furniture shop, King's Chicken Joint and the Barbecue Cafe. I thread the pavement outside the bank and all the way to Mothercare. I've possessed the road and am a glistening circle at the roundabout.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.

Los Angeles had no culture of its own, just a large collection of misreadings of the artistic histories of other, proper cities.

Detroit is still seen as the tough city, a city that has a reputation for high crime, ... The tough city thing is fine. Its always had a reputation as that. ... You know, Gordie Howe, when I was watching hockey, was the toughest guy in the league playing for the Red Wings. He represented that tough aura.

I say we don't need art in nature, because it's so perfect without us. We need it in the cities. But the cities have absolutely lost their own center. They think having ten cars and a big bridge is the way to happiness. It's not.

Well, here you had a city that was selling more cars than ever before, that had this wondrous music being created, that was so vital to the labor and civil rights of this country, and yet it was dying and didn't see it, except for some sociologist at Wayne State University who predicted that Detroit was losing population by a half-million by the end of that '60s decade, and that that trend would continue taking away its tax base.

In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbors.

Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind.

The smell of death was thick in the city of Vara?asi. And in Tokyo as well. And yet the birds blissfully sang their songs.

There is no greater symbol of the artistic spirit of Scotland than the Mackintosh building. But more than that it is a symbol of where art belongs, rising as it does out of the heart of a great city. A mighty castle on a hill, it is a part of me, and of all Glaswegians.

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.

I didn't have much of a life in crime as a graffiti writer.

Graffiti doesn't exist unless someone got a photo, because it's gone immediately.

There are so many cities in every single city.