Frank Norris Quotes

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

The city is always influential in the work, though I've had that temptation to leave, but only recently. It's difficult because whenever I start working someplace else, I'm like, "Man, this would have been better if I had my subwoofer."

Exotic novelty. My statement to [people] is always, well, set this picture in your home town, is it still an interesting picture? Or is it just exotic? Would I care about this same picture minus its exoticism?

In the city, nudity means something; in the wild, it just exists.

My parents are my biggest influences. My parents and my city. Brooklyn, New York, New York City, the community I grew up. I don't feel like I'm special in that. I feel like that's everybody.

When I'm on the road making a movie in another city, on my day off, I always go to the movies. I love going to the movies. You get a ticket and sit there, and it's very interesting to be around people who aren't personally invested in you, in any way. They're just going to the movies.

All human stories are interesting. You don't put a kid in a show because you need a device. They have a story, too.

New York has inspired more remarkable music than any other city I can think of.

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

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

I feel like your city - with hip hop in particular, because we're always beating our chest and shouting where we're from - your city is just as influential as your parents. Even the grimy, hardcore gangster rap from New York - KRS-One and Wu Tang, the stuff acknowledges it.

The city [ LA] is kind of going through an interesting transition; sort of renaissance time where there is so much going on here. I think it's really exciting to be here.

Growing up in Jersey City was interesting. I got to learn a lot about different cultures: I had Hindu friends, Middle Eastern friends, black friends, Spanish friends.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

Berlin definitely has one of the most vibrant of the startup scenes that I have seen. Not really just across Europe, but across the whole world in terms of cities. It's an interesting dynamic.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach.

For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive - Mexico City's big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.

Los Angeles is such a mysterious place because there's so much evil in that city, but there's also so much light. You can be totally alone on a hillside and I love that kind of secluded, deserted rawness.

Psychotherapy makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong.

I have been to Tokyo and several other cities, but I have never been to Yamaguchi Prefecture. I wonder what it is like, what interesting things it has to offer. I am sure that Prime Minister [ Shinzō] Abe will tell me all about it.

One has to live in Washington to know what a city of rumors it is.

New York is the greatest character actor ever. Any film that is shot in New York is elevated by the city.

We didn't just wake up one day and here is the United States of America, and it is the gem, the shining city on the hill, however you want to describe it, it had to be built. It was not there. But from the moment it began to be built, isn't it interesting that everybody in the world who heard about it wanted to go there?