London is a fantastic creator of jobs – but many of these jobs are going to people who don’t originate in this country.
I thought of Paris as a beauty spot on the face of the earth, and of London as a big freckle.
I wake up every morning and I feel like I’m juggling glass balls. I live in Los Angeles, my business is run out of London, and most evenings I’m cuddled up in front of Skype, in my dressing gown, speaking with my studio in London. I travel a lot, my team travel a lot, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
There are plenty of cities that have given me the time of my life for a week or two – including Sao Paulo, Paris, and New York – but London has an enduring appeal that keeps on unfolding.
When I grew up in central London, we had six pavement slabs for a garden.
Being in London has really taught me how important history is. Just having information of the past. It helps you predict the future, which is all we really have as, you know, humans.
The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.
I grew up in the East End of London, the youngest of three boys in a Catholic household. Both my parents were market traders and worked seven days a week.
London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it’s far from representative of what life in England is actually about.
In London, ‘Equus’ caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.
My cousin’s gay, he went to London only to find out that Big Ben was a clock.
Only people who live outside cities realize the size of them. London turns out to be huge; there are great swaths, vast panoramas, a whole diaspora I’d never imagined. The place I live in tends to be manageably small, a few familiar journeys and destinations.
To throw a shoe at a man in Dundee is the equivalent of a kiss on the cheek and an embrace in London. Dundee is a very different place; they have their own rules.
I started acting when I was seven. And I went to a local drama school which is very well-known in London. Because of that, I started getting jobs, and I worked all the time as a child, pretty much non-stop.
My dad grew up in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, desperate to get to London. I grew up in London, so I don’t know what it’s like to yearn for the big city from a small town.
While I was in London it was completely upside-down. I got a whole new life and it was a challenge to keep in touch with my life in Ireland, but it was great fun. Now though, I’ve been back home since November and gradually all connections with my HP life have been fading.
When I saw the Penderecki concert in London, in ’92 or ’93, I thought there were speakers in the room. It was just strings. But I could hear these kind of buzzings and rumblings, and I was like, ‘Where is this all coming from?’ And that was just better, to my ears. Odder, stranger, more magical.
Me being in Houston, I wanted to leave there because it was only known for one thing. That’s why I hit N.Y.; that’s why I hit L.A. That’s why I hit Paris, London. I just picked up basically everything, but I morphed it into what Travi$ Scott is and into what I know is fresh.
When I was at graduate school in London, I began working at NBC News, which had a thriving documentary unit.
I applied to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and didn’t get in the first year, so I worked at Costa and the Dean Gallery Cafe then applied again and got in the next year when I was 18. I was so excited.
My flat in Ladbroke Grove, west London, is in the best building in the world. It’s like a commune – everyone gets on – and on Friday evenings I often cook us all dinner.
It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.
It’s hard for it to make a mark in this city because London has so much culture to offer.
As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work – physically – in the same way.
My father, who was illiterate, smoothed iron for Ford Dagenham and we’d get up at 5;30 A.M. to give him a jump-start. My mother was a nurse and part of the Windrush generation. Growing up in east London, we were financially poor, but rich in hope and dignity, and we were happy.
As an actress and comedienne, I’m a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of ‘Twelfth Night’ there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack?
People are friendlier in New York than London.
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes – of course, there are thousands. It’s a very talented city.
In course of time the Brothers Cowper removed the manufacture of their printing machines from London, to Manchester. There they found skilled and energetic workmen, ready to carry their plans into effect.
I don’t think I’d live in London unless you paid me. Nine figures would be nice.
There are wonderful restaurants in London. I love Indian food and I like Arab food, and I go very often to the Arab restaurant Noura.
My favourite restaurant of all time is Mildreds on London’s Lexington Street. It’s a little vegetarian restaurant and is really fun and healthy, too. It was the first place I went to in London and really liked. That was 20 years ago, and it is still my favourite.
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
Yes, I was inspired by Jack London and still love reading his books. Ernie Banks is another hero because I lived in Chicago for two years as a kid, and I loved that he was the Cubs’ loyal underdog and one of the first African-Americans to make that breakthrough.
Hitchcock’s got a very interesting voice; it’s a very controlled, measured rhythm that’s quite slow and, in that sense, also felt quite controlling in its pace. He retained something from his childhood, that London sound, as well as adopting some of the L.A. sounds… All of this helps you create the character.
The first time I came to London on my own, I was 15. I was absolutely oblivious to so many things. I had no expectations, no fears. I just came to do a National Youth Theatre season one summer. It was just brilliant.
I had made up my mind to find a woman to share my life: one who would leave London altogether and go with me into the green country and be satisfied.
As a young girl, I was too intent on getting to London and drama school and out of east Yorkshire to think about winning Oscars. I did win a Bafta once, and was so unprepared for it I jabbered on for a minute – a minute too long.
Two successive commissioners in London police were fired by the mayor that came into office. That doesn’t mean the police in London is not independent and does not exercise powers. Ultimately it is the political executive that has to answer.
London is my favorite place in the world. I love London. I think it has the best of L.A. and New York in one, and I have a really great friend there.
We did a remake of Lost in Space. Filmed it in London for four months.
Our Sheffield and London homes are worth well over a million but the bank owns most of them – we are mortgaged up to the gills.
Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score.
Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.
You hear about things happening to people – they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way – and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don’t want to die in some unnecessary way.
I myself identify as British-Nigerian, and I’m also gay, and I’m also a young adult in London making music. All of things can co-exist as one.
The four places I’ve called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places.
If you’re from South London you feel like you’re always trying to win people over, so perhaps that underdog passion comes through.
In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise.
I will always have two regrets. I don’t have a presence in London, and I would have liked to have done more work in the Middle East.
I know my Beijing medal has been a watershed moment in the history of Indian boxing, but personally speaking, I would like to better it in London.
I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.
Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
