Meg Rosoff Quotes

More often than what you're suggesting, I find people are surprised that I have an urban side to me.

I think Los Angeles is often portrayed as kind of a petri dish, where bad decisions start and then spread to the rest of the world. I don't see it that way. I feel Los Angeles is a place of almost primal struggle and survival. It's not a city that embraces its inhabitants.

There'll always be that prep in me that I can't seem to get rid of.

Different races never fazed me because coming from Bethnal Green, I'd been around people of different races forever. Different class? That was much harder.

These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

From when I was born to when I was 21, I never left Toronto. That's why I'm such a city cat.

I grew up in New York City, and I'm a city boy, born and bred.

I'm definitely a city kid.

I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don't entirely want in their lives.

I grew up in the streets of San Diego, and I love this city dearly. I love this city. San Diego is my home. Even though I represent Los Angeles, this is my home.

I have lived my whole life in Delhi. I used to live in Rohini and then I moved to Munirka. I have seen north and south Delhi very closely. That's why my songs and raps have a Dilli waali feel to it. Delhi made me who I am today and I am proud of it.

London's got less of a group identity because it's a melting pot and it's bigger. Whereas if you're from Glasgow or Newcastle or wherever, the group atmosphere is already there.

It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other an never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.

We lived in a neighborhood that was too rich for us. When I was young, I had to deliver groceries to the homes of the kids I went to school with. I had to go to the back doors to make the deliveries. It was embarrassing. That was one thing out of a hundred.

I'd read an enormous amount but had spent so much time in my own head that I didn't have extensive social skills. Suddenly I was in this world where I was surrounded by these incredibly polished and wealthy kids who had gone to prep schools, and I felt daunted by them. I don't think people were aware of how full of anxiety I was... For a long time I felt like I was living in a place where I shouldn't have been.

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me.

Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history; it is haunted by history. You cannot walk around it without perceiving it. In Los Angeles, it is quite the opposite: it is an older city than it might seem to be, but you don't perceive this -- every day you get out of your home, you are driving somewhere and sometimes you get this impression that everything was put there the night before.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

Those who visit foreign nations, but who associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs 'caelum non animum mutant': they see new meridians, but the same men, and with heads as empty as their pockets.

Somalis have made my city of Wilmington, Delaware, [ their home ] on a smaller scale. There is a large, very identifiable Somali community.

England never felt claustrophobic for me at all. I think it would feel more difficult for me if I lived in mainland Europe. America I think is really easy because Los Angeles has film stars everywhere and musicians and Santa Barbara a lot of people have homes there even if they don't live there. You are kind of inconsequential, no one cares.

Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it's not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.