Wong Kar-wai Quotes

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

My agent in London says all New York films are wonderful if they're really New York films because they're like travelogues.

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.

One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

I've always been drawn to city skylines.

I love New York. It just reminds me of so many movies... I look up at buildings, and feel like Godzilla should be climbing up them or something.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

The physical environment of L.A. is really beautiful. It's actually kinda fun, too, if you're working. It's just not really fun if you're not working and you don't know anybody.

New York is the great stone desert.

L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.

Beijing was such a different city. There were so few cars, I could walk in the middle of the road. In the summer, the streetlamps attracted swirling bugs. I loved those bugs: crickets, praying mantis, all kinds of beetles. I also have a vivid memory of dazzling sunlight coming out of the sky.

Because it's in and about New York City, I knew 'Ex Machina' was going to have to continually mix the mundane and the fantastic.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

The world's major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.

Cities are immortal.

I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

That New York energy, when you've got the benefit of great weather, it really is terrific. You look up at that skyline, and the Empire State Building is literally in your eyesight - there's nothing like that.