City of Contrasts Quotes

To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme.

Man, I love coming home. St. Louis is actually hard to capture.

Rio's a beautiful city, a vibrant place, special place.

With 'Greenberg,' I wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles... my great love for it and also the way that I felt not at home and alienated there.

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East.

I discovered Los Angeles in the late '90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.

I love Milan, and I'm not just saying that. It's a city that gives me a great sense of euphoria. I can't explain why, but I feel a special energy there.

New York is this cacophony - a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city... But there is one thing about it. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.

L.A. is such an exotic city to me, and it is just a big bubble. If you accept the bubble and accept how isolated it is. It can be a very creative place, and I find it easy to focus.

It sounds stupid, but there's nothing like walking down the street and seeing a building that's older than 100 years old. I think London - not to sound pretentious - like New York, it's a big melting pot for all things and it's just got this energy that you can't find anywhere else.

L.A is a huge place, literally and metaphorically. Its beauty and horror. Its unconventional history. Its draw and allure. Its diversity and segregation.

People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don't know. It's like Baltimore or something. I don't know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors.

I'm old and boring in London and get really tired around midnight. But in Berlin, I had this new lease of life because there's something electric about the place.

The thing about Mumbai is you go five yards and all of human existence is revealed. It's an incredible cavalcade of life, and I love that.

I thought of Paris as a beauty spot on the face of the earth, and of London as a big freckle.

That's one of the things I like about San Francisco. It's not like anywhere else in the world.

Pittsburgh was a wonderful place to grow up - diverse and complex, one could go from one culture to a completely different one in just a few blocks. It was a whole world in one city.

New York used to be so much more than just a place to shop. It was life on the street for the eccentrics; it was an eccentric city. It had many different tastes. Now it's just one - a really rich one - with big tall glass buildings.

I love San Francisco so much. I call it the Emerald City and have been coming here since 1992. I have a few old friends that live here, and my aunt and uncle live in Oakland. I think it's a magical city - it's big, sexy and very 'cosmo' with a small-town feel.

I never thought about moving to L.A.; I always wanted to be in New York. I moved there, and now I still have a kind of love affair with the city.

Mumbai may not be my city. But it is my kind of city.