Neighborhood Dynamics Quotes

In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.

You Americans keep saying that Cuba is ninety miles from the United States. I say that the United States is ninety miles from Cuba and for us, that is worse.

Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

I was black growing up in an all-white neighborhood, so I felt like I just didn't fit in. Like I wasn't as good as everybody else, or as smart, or whatever.

What I like best in Baltimore is the people, the neighborhoods and what goes on in the neighborhoods. Each has its own stories, own diners and own quirks. It's about community. I also like everything Old Bay.

One thing I noticed working in the Bronx is that leaders come in the craziest places. They don't always show up at community board meetings. Sometimes it's just the guys on the corner that the boys on the block respect.

Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent.

I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner.

In a hamlet of ten households, there are bound to be those who are my equal in doing their best for others and in being trustworthy in what they say, but they are unlikely to be as eager to learn as I am.

In New York, if you go into an Italian-American neighbourhood, the code of the streets is respect and reputation.

People are still tied to their hoods, and it's usually not the artist, it's usually the friends and instigators who get it popping.

To me, the idea that any kind of disaster helps create a nation seems a ridiculous one. There was no family in the house on the land next to me, and there might have been.

We used to have a bull. A real bull. At that time, Jennifer Lopez was my neighbor. God bless her, she took it. But other neighbors did not like it, that we have a bull.

In Ehrenfeld, we were all jammed together. All the fathers were foreign-born - Welsh, Irish, Polish, Sicilian. We were so jammed together, we picked up each other's accents. And we spoke some broken English. When I got into the service, people used to think I was from a foreign country.

A bad neighbor is a misfortune, as much as a good one is a great blessing.

I live in East Hollywood which is sort of the end of the grit, butting up against Silverlake and Los Feliz which are the refined gentrified hipster zones, which I tend to appreciate when I need to get coffee, but I like living in the grit. I like feeling separate from that elitist civilization in some way, even though I don't really "belong" in the grit either. But I do spend more than half my time now in the desert which is really nice - to be off the grid, remembering that the world is bigger than the city streets.

I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough.

In the post-war United States, you had this race to the suburbs. Cities shrank, the suburbs got bigger - and the notion of community changed drastically. You went from all being very close together to all being spaced apart and slightly suspicious of one another.

I was the freak who moved into the nice neighborhood.

South Central Los Angeles [is the] home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.

Gangsters lived in the neighborhood. They weren't apart from it. Their relationships with people were both benevolent and scary.

The neighborhood children, of course, were forbidden by their parents to play with my little boy, Garth, so I finally got him a little kitten to play with. A couple of weeks later we found it on the porch with its neck wrung.

I've lived next door to people all my life. I don't know how cute they think I am.