I'm addicted to New York, and I like L.A., as I have kids there. Sometimes I think New Mexico is the one place where I could almost live there. It helps your acting; there's magic in that place.
A tree forms itself in answer to its place and the light. Explain it how you will, the only thing explainable will be your explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV
I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.
I may not have written the stories that I've written if I hadn't ended up in Niverville. I don't know; I don't know. How can you know?
If I'm in london it can be different than if I'm somewhere else.
If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.
I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.
Political writings are often over-exaggerated polemics bearing the imprint of the period and the place in which written.
I grew up in Solihull, on the edge of what was then the Birmingham conurbation. It was a good place to write comedy from. I didn't feel allegiance to anything. I didn't have working-class pride or upper-class superiority.
It just so happens that I was born and raised in Washington. Had I been born in Chicago or San Antonio, the streets and places would have figured into whatever I wrote. Just so happens that it's Washington, D.C.
A lot of my world-view is formed by the places I've been.
Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.
I think there are ways a place can sneak its way into a song, or a feeling that you take into the studio.
A man can be in two different places and he will be two different men. Maybe if you think of more places he will be more men, but two is enough for now.
We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.
And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.
I don't want to compare myself to somebody like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but I feel like, for some writers, going to a certain city, a certain place, is what kickstarts your imaginative process.
