Urban Contrasts Quotes

There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.

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.

What I love about L.A. and Washington, D.C. is that they're almost the opposite of each other. L.A. is a very creative space while D.C. is a very cerebral space. So, they're the ying and the yang in my world. I like them both for their own reasons.

I had thought that Tokyo would be like New York City, but it wasn't. I'd imagined that they'd be similar in their bustle and noise level, but, in fact, Tokyo is a very calm metropolis. The bright lights and hectic night-life images so often found in advertisements and Western media do not reflect every day Japan.

I grew up half in South Central and half in the San Fernando valley.

You know Manchester is always a bit of a hard place for people coming from London, just with all the history. Manchester has this immensely huge and healthy history musically.

I feel like all Londoners relate more to New York - L.A. doesn't feel like a 'city' city. It's like a sleepy town.

New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate.

L.A. is the opposite of Britain in a lot of respects, and that's what draws so many British people here.

In San Francisco - life goes on. Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street. A young girl looks out a window and wishes she were married. A drunk sleeps under a bridge. It is tomorrow.

The energy that New York exudes is as much the light of extinguished souls as it is the spark of individual enterprise. And while the full meaning of the city may prove elusive, all New Yorkers are painfully aware that it remains an intractable mass of contradictions. It is not just the extremes of wealth and poverty living side by side.

I've never lived anywhere else in my life, I have a massive love-hate relationship with this city. I grew up in the western suburbs in the '80s and for everything we had to go to south Bombay - so you lived the whole city, in a sense.

There are a lot of interesting differences between Boston and New York in general, and I think they're sort of heightened in Long Island.

Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.

No offense to Boston, but I was glad to get out of there. I think it's just because I'm from Philly. Honestly, the blue collar side of each are pretty similar in ways, but something about the makeup of your brain, Philly versus Boston. It's a lot different, in weird ways.

Miami, in many ways, is a quintessentially American city. The juxtaposition of showy wealth with dire pennilessness, the tussle of glitz and decay doesn't come any more marked than here.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

I've been to L.A. before, and I love the sunshine and the fact that people seem so genuinely nice and pleased to see you - which is so different from London. Maybe I'll end up so tired of smiles and helpfulness that I'll long for the rudeness and cynicism of home.

L.A. will never, ever, ever, ever be my town. It'll never be my town. It's not New York.

I like to think Portland and L.A. are not rivals; they're cousins. As cities on the West Coast, they're distinct in their own way but still culturally similar.

The good thing about Pittsburgh, it's a good place to be raised... it doesn't tolerate assholes. You're either a good guy or you're a bad guy... When I'm in Los Angeles having these incredibly surreal moments where nobody's saying anything and everybody's talking incessantly, I always have that Pittsburgh voice in my head - shut up, smile, get the job, move on.