Seeing New York in the movies is what made me want to live in Manhattan one day. I eventually got my wish, and the city has never disappointed me.
Growing up in the south, N.Y.C. always seemed like a destination to visit but not to live in.
I love the infinite variety of New York, how it's the epicenter of so many worlds.
I wouldn't be the actor I am without New York.
When I moved to New York, I remember thinking, 'I'm never going to live anywhere else.'
I am a Chicagoan. I feel like I've simply been on vacation for 10 years in Los Angeles. But Chicago is a real place, and L.A. is a motel.
When I went to New York to try and make it, I never thought it wouldn't happen.
I think of L.A. as truly the melting pot. It's basically a mini-country unto itself.
To start with, I love New York... It's a little bit of the whole world... In New York, the whole world comes to you.
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.
There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
By the end of the 1980s, Seattle had taken on the dangerous lustre of a promised city. The rumour had gone out that if you had failed in Detroit you might yet succeed in Seattle - and that if you'd succeeded in Seoul, you could succeed even better in Seattle... Seattle was the coming place. So I joined the line of hopefuls.
New York means so much to people. If you're inclined to leave the nest, New York is where most people think they have to go, and it's been that way since the first skyscraper.
Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic.
No place is better than Akron.
I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.
Atlanta is a city that welcomed me from the first day.
I love Chicago. I wouldn't be where I am now, and I certainly wouldn't have the confidence that I hope that I project, if I'd not lived in Chicago.
I don't mean to sound like a Pollyanna, but for me, New York is the ideal because of the diversity here. 'Billy on the Street' is really informed by that.
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.
I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it - well, it is dangerous - but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work.
What Disneyland was to my kids at age 10, that's kind of what Chicago is for economists.
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.
As a youngster, I lived in Philly for 12 years, and I would go up to New York to do shows and make money - it was the dream to maybe be able to survive there and live there.
There's a reason I moved to NYC, and if I listed all the musicians on my list you'd grow weary.
