Lou Harrison Quotes

I don't do really well in cities, which is crazy given that we're flying in and out of these major cities every week.

I loathe crowds. I especially don't like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

I would never be able to spend all my life in a busy city like Mumbai.

When I was a kid, my mom used to run the vacuum cleaner, and the noise would bother me so much that I would run into the woods to calm down. I feel like that vacuum cleaner has been on since I moved to New York City.

I do not like confrontations in New York City.

New York can be a tad stressful.

I can't stay in L.A. too long or it starts to grow on me in a bad way.

Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.

Not only do I not know what's going on, I wouldn't know what to do about it if I did.

I didn't know a soul when I got to New York, and I felt really displaced. The first week I was euphoric, and then I realized how isolating the city can be.

New York is a bit of a dangerous place to me because you often leave in a blur.

A lot of things that happen in the world make me a bit crazy.

I'm not fond of cities: the constant activity and swarms of people.

I have no idea what I'm doin'. I've never seen me.

I was screaming constantly, on the set, in my room... everywhere.

Computers make me totally blank out.

I just sort of lost my head for a little while.

I can tell you from experience that when you get that pent-up and crazed, it can be distracting.

I spend most of my days pacing around, muttering that I have no ideas, feeling like I'm walking a plank.

I just don't know where my head is sometimes.

I find a lot of input from other people very stressful.

I find New York very frightening, I must say.

Living in a city is stressful absent terrorism.

It is like sitting in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway with your windows rolled up and Portuguese music booming out of the surround-sound speakers while animals gnaw on your neck and diseased bill collectors hammer on your doors with golf clubs.

Without even knowing it, we are assaulted by a high note of urgency all the time. We end up pacing ourselves to the city rhythm whether or not it's our own. In time we even grow hard of hearing to the rest of the world. Like a violinist stuck next to the timpani, we may lose the ability to hear our own instrument.