My mother and I were very close and even when I left home and came to London I would ring her every day. She was very proud of me and loved my celebrity. She would often come to shoots and TV shows with me.
I never felt at home in London, because people were constantly telling me I didn’t belong here, so after a while, you tend to believe that.
If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It’s 17 hours of straight flying from London. It’s very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you’re on another planet. But I like that. Also, that’s ideal for writing.
In London, I’ve always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.
I’m always afraid someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder one day and say, ‘Back to North London.’
I had never seen an avocado until I came to London in 1994. They just weren’t a feature of southern Italian cuisine.
The vibe of London as a city is captivating. It’s both fast-paced and extremely rushed but still has the calmness that would attract any big-city person.
I became the toast of London. A lot of people I met came from these really decadent families where the married men were gay and no one thought anything about it.
In Hamburg, there are three major orchestras, an opera house, and one of the great concert-hall acoustics in Europe at the Laeiszhalle, in a town a fifth the size of London. And that’s not unusual. In Germany, there are dozens of towns with two or three orchestras. The connection with music goes very, very deep.
I wish more people knew that the only one of the three main parties where not a single MP flipped from one property to the next, and not a single MP avoided capital-gains tax, where every single London MP did not claim a penny of second-home allowance, was the Liberal Democrats.
Believe me, I did not come to London to cook farmed fish. All my fish are wild.
I want to win a gold medal in London.
London changes because of money. It’s real estate. If they can build some offices or expensive apartments they will, it’s money that changes everything in a city.
I used to work for Symantec AV: I worked as their in-house IT technician, and then I worked as specialized AV support, and then I worked for Hartford Life IT, in Dublin and London. I worked in IT from ’99 through to 2007.
Ever since I was little it was programmed into me that London is where great theatre occurs and all the big shows you love start there.
London, from the architecture to the culture to the fashion to the accents, feels like it’s a special place.
In the movies, I loved Errol Flynn whether he was playing a soldier or a pirate. I dug pirates. In fact, my first exposure to live performances was when my paternal grandfather took me to a D’Oyly Carte performance of ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ which impresario Sol Hurok imported from London. I loved every minute of it.
When Blur first started and we were playing Manchester the Hacienda was the place to go. That was where a lot of exciting stuff was happening and London was pretty dead.
I knew I really made it when my dad saw me in London and after the performance he had no notes to me and just said ‘You are doing your own thing and I am proud of you.’
I really love being in London at weekends – there’s always so much to do.
I wanted to acknowledge my U.S. heritage and to belong to it more closely. Having said that, I am certainly British by formation and education and readily think of London as home. I had never lived in the U.S. till 2007.
I love London.
When Culture Club broke up, I hadn’t been going out a lot because we’d been working all the time, so I suddenly had this period of leisure. And it was just around the time that the whole acid house thing kicked off in London.
My first vote was for a communist in east London when I was a medical student. But I’ve voted Tory, Labour and Lib Dem in my time.
I hate going out in Brighton now. It’s different in London. People respect you more there.
Everyone in L.A. is very positive and upbeat, whereas London can get quite miserable at times.
I have a more personal insight into the importance of core strength because my wife Louise runs a Pilates studio in London. I have enjoyed getting into Pilates. I am not the most supple but I enjoy Pilates more than yoga.
He comes to London and gets a job in a nightclub, a gay club, where he’s known as Straight Dave by the bar staff – and no one believes he’s as straight as he claims to be. He meets the daughter of the club manager, and he has an affair with her.
I definitely want to do more movies, and I’m also a writer, so I have a few screenplays that I’m working on, one of them based off my one-woman show that I used to do in New York. Two of the screenplays I’ve written by myself, and then I’m also working on one with my writing partner, Tom Riley, who’s in London.
The heavy spacesuits are spectacular to look at but very hot. Putting one on was like going from chilly London winter weather to the Bahamas in just minutes.
I’ve never been outside Heathrow so it will be exciting to see what London has to offer. I think I’ve only flown into Heathrow maybe twice.
I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, ‘There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.’
London Fashion Week is so different from any of the others. Compared to the strictness in New York, London seems freer from commercial constraints. Truer to the process, to street style, to a sense of humour.
The thing about New York is it’s like London: you want to go to the boutique places. You can go to the big department stores – Barney’s, Bloomingdales and all that stuff – but I like the little stores.
I think if you live in London, it’s such a cosmopolitan city; nobody even notices different-race relationships. I assumed it would be even more liberal in the States, and it’s totally the opposite.
I am obsessed with the whole Victoriana thing, the whole Jack the Ripper London era, the grayness of it, the haunted feeling of it, all ancient and bloody.
I tell people I live in Harlesden in north-west London, and I can see them thinking, ‘Why do you live there?’
The blood of the just will be demanded of London, burnt by fire in the year ’66. The ancient Lady will fall from her high place, and many of the same sect will be killed.
The London police have discovered that the best way to neuter demonstrations is not to move everyone on, or disperse troublemakers, but hold them close, cordon them into a diminishing space for hours and hours, as a sort of arbitrary al fresco arrest.
I feel at home when I go to London.
My having won a gold medal in Beijing is not going to be an extra advantage. It does not have any bearing on how I perform in London in a year’s time.
The thing I’d really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare’s Globe. I’d like to walk along that. Don’t worry, I won’t get drunk and fall in.
I modeled for a little while in college. I was desperate to travel, and I got scouted, and they wanted me to go to Paris and London for six months. And I discovered that I hated it. I didn’t like the expectation to be pretty all the time.
I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.
Last time I was in London, I visited Number 5, Bruton Street, which is the address I gave to Violet Bridgerton, the matriarch of the Bridgerton clan in my novels. It was a bit disconcerting to learn that it’s actually a pub.
London style is individual.
In Moscow I feel most comfortable. I’m used to four different seasons; it’s difficult for people in London to understand. People brought up in Russia like my kids want to play in the snow.
I was a sort of rock journalist – whatever that is – in London in the late ’60s.
I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn’t in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging.
By 1956, London Transport was recruiting in Barbados, even loaning migrants the costs of their passage to Britain. British Rail placed ads in the Barbados Labour Office and the NHS appealed to West Indian women to come to Britain and train to become nurses.
When I was flying to Rome, we flew over London; I felt like bursting into tears. It’s part of me, so I can’t leave London behind for good.
Most of my world is in London, and I feel like this is where I went mad and ended up finding myself.
At the time, we thought it was a nice way to say something unique about the group to make us different from all the other bands kicking around in London.
The Good Friday Agreement and the basic rights and entitlements of citizens that are enshrined within it must be defended and actively promoted by London and Dublin.
The whole London football scene is now financially more powerful and ambitious than ever before. That reflects the city’s economic might and its multiculturalism. Now West Ham have a new , and Spurs and Chelsea will follow. And the London clubs have widened their areas of support.
