Iain Sinclair Quotes

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.

I was born in Patterson, New Jersey, and raised pretty much all around the country. My family tended to move from place to place following economic prospects and jobs and looking for new opportunities, so we changed schools, colleges, grade schools, high schools every 6 months to a year - depending on the breaks.

In America, people rarely stay in the town where they grew up, rarely stay in close proximity to their parents throughout their lives. You rarely find parents in their old age being taken care of by their children.

The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don't move, and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you're born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you've lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable.

We don't know, ultimately, if we'll end up in San Francisco, but we're talking about keeping the house. It would be nice to always have a place here.

I've lived in the same apartment since seventh grade. It's in my name now; my mom moved upstate.

There are several factors in modern society that contribute to loneliness. One is that we are more mobile than we have been in decades past, which is fantastic in many respects, but also leads to us to move away from communities that we grew up with and got to know over time.

I was born in Chicago. I moved to Detroit until I was six and moved to Oakland at that point. And then we had a couple years in Stockton and Pasadena. And by the time I was 13, I was back in Oakland.

My parents moved to Los Angeles before I was born and built a beautiful home here in Bel Air.

Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother's property, a tiny plot of land, and that's great. But in the Age of Movement, there's no question that the number of people who don't - or can't - is growing exponentially.

I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.

Like many of us in Arizona, I wasn't born here - I'm a product of the Midwest and the working class.

For resident stability, I fully agree with the government's stance that stabilizing the housing market should be the first and foremost step.

I wasn't a happy kid. I felt like my mum ruined our chance of a better life, because when she remarried, we went to live in Bahrain, on a compound with a swimming pool, and she ruined it all.

I don't want to bring a European city or an east-coast city to the West Coast.

My ultimate goal? To move my momma out of Birmingham. To move my whole family out of Birmingham, my friends, my family, me. It don't even need to be out of Birmingham, just to a better community, a gated community or something.

Families used to come from somewhere, and that's where they stayed.

Very few people live in the same house they move into when they're married or the same neighborhood when they're married. Very few people certainly live in the neighborhood they grew up in.

Neither of my parents live in Oakland anymore. They both got priced out.

I've lived in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Dallas. I started in Orlando, so I've been north and south.

In many cases, the joy and honor of having a home has lifted people into a spirit of determination to try and achieve a better life for themselves and their families.

Detroit in its heyday - let's say, 1920s to the '60s - was never a huge downtown-living thing. People lived in the neighborhoods.

I kinda grew up in different places. I was just from everywhere.

By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved 13 times.