Contrasting Environments Quotes

I grew up in the 'hood around prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, and gangbangers, but I also grew up juxtaposed: On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library bookshelf situation.

And then I went to visit my sister in the states and all of a sudden it was just like, it's like... it's like the movie Wizard of Oz when all of a sudden it changes from Black and White to glorious Technicolor.

I always like to play in beautiful cathedrals, when I can somehow get access to do a punk show there.

I'm very much half city and half country boy.

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

I had the best of both worlds when I was a kid. I'd spend a quiet week with my mum, then I'd go to my dad's property in the Adelaide Hills, where there were all these kids and animals running around.

I grew up on the west side of Detroit - 6 mile and Wyoming - so I was really in the 'hood. And I would go to school at Detroit Waldorf, and that was not the 'hood. Growing up in Detroit was good. I had a good perspective, a well-rounded one, and not being one-sided.

It's easy to look at South Central and say, 'That's a bad place,' and it's easy to look at Beverly Hills and say, 'It will be a cakewalk,' but it just exposed me to a different set of problems. Both sides relate to each other more than they think.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

I was born in Dallas, and I grew up both there and in New York City, which was very schizophrenic.

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream off things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.

The Long Island experience is so strange. You're a satellite around the city, so the presence of the city is always looming.

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.

I see myself as half country boy and half city boy, so I need both to balance me out. I couldn't spend all of my time in either place.

The virtue of the country is that it makes you thirsty for the city.

We've been civilized from the beginning. In the desert, it's a baroque city like Paris or Rome.

The space and light up there in Norfolk is wonderfully peaceful. I find myself doing funny things like gardening, and cooking, which I rarely do in London.

I'm a southern girl, and I grew up with this slightly schizophrenic upbringing where I bounced back and forth between Atlanta, Georgia, and a tiny mountain town called Brevard, North Carolina. My parents were divorced, and my two lives were very different because of socioeconomic reasons.

On the football field, I keep my emotions tied up inside, but when I'm with my family, I let them out.

It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.

I'm torn between wanting to connect with what I grew up with and what's available, living in Brooklyn. I don't have a grimy supermarket that decapitates frogs' heads nearby.

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

I live in the middle of nowhere. I'm a country bumpkin in Ireland, in Donegal, and to go from that to Toronto, huge city, massive buildings just stretching so tall.

I go through phases of not liking the pretention and sycophantic nature of L.A. but I can be surfing in 10 minutes and snowboarding in two hours - I love the connection with nature.

It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.