City Perception Quotes

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there

Growing up in the south, N.Y.C. always seemed like a destination to visit but not to live in.

I remember returning to Bangalore after a few months of travel and seeing it as a first-world city, like New York or San Francisco. This may be obvious to some people, but I grew up in Delhi, and I had no experience of how someone from a 'Tier 2' city may view a 'Tier 1' city. You really do emigrate between worlds when you come from those towns.

This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good-looking and the skyscrapers and everything. But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable.

In 1977, hip-hop literally wasn't outside the boroughs. But I was profoundly aware of the city through films like Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection, and Network. I had a friend who visited New York, and I asked him what it was like. He said, "Oh, it's great. Just wear a coat and don't look anyone in the eye."

Hindi films are so deceptive. I thought Mumbai was this big, grand, beautiful city with sea-facing flats.

Knowing that more people associate Chicago with street violence than generosity is difficult for me because, despite all my proclamations of being from the Bay Area, I have spent much of my life in Chicago. So I have a deep love and a pretty good understanding of the city.

A lot of people don't expect people to live in Chicago. But Chicago is a sick city.

It's a big con job. We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it is a dreary little dump most of the time.

Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.

If you hang around people from L.A., they're, like, used to having their city being maligned.

I used to say Edinburgh was a beautiful actress with no talent. I thought it was just like a shortbread tin. I think that's because I did six Festivals in a row there, and I never saw the real Edinburgh, just a lot of deeply annoying Cambridge Footlights kids wanting to be actresses.

When someone hears that I've written a book about 1897, I'm usually met with blank stares. And the first thing they say is, 'Was there even an L.A. back then?' A lot of people don't even think there was a city before the movies appeared. That concept of Los Angeles is so strong in the popular imagination that celebrity overrides everything.

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.

From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation

I can't wait 'til the world embraces Chicago - not only for our talent, but just to visit our city and not be so scared to come to it and not be subjected to what people's perception is of it.

If you're inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you're doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you're just not looking hard enough.

Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It's a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.

But the people who took the bus didn't experience the city as we experienced the city. The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.

I live in Los Angeles, which is the youngest place - there's no history to Los Angeles. Everything's fake.

Growing up in a suburban home, the world seems so massive to you. It seems like cities are so big and so far away, and there's so much in them. So your imagination runs wild, instead of when you are born in the middle of Manhattan, you'd know, like, that this is the biggest city.

I think when people think of Compton, of course, they always think of gangster rap. But if you ever had an opportunity to go to Compton, you would know that Compton is a beautiful city.

It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.

For being such a dark city, 'Gotham,' it's a really, really sweet group of people, very welcoming.