Local Talent Quotes

I think Baltimore is a wonderful artistic community with a lot of great musicians. It's kind of like a little secret for musicians.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

I got my start in small dive bars in New Orleans.

I grew up in a really rural town, Stratford, Ontario, with 30,000 people. There's a big festival thrown in the town. A lot of people travel from all over the world to see it, and growing up, I actually used to busk on the street. I'd play my guitar, sing, and people would throw money in the case.

Chicago is a wonderful, vibrant city with wonderful food cultures to it, wonderful talent downtown.

Got two kids; one's a record producer who lives just up the road from me - great guitarist and piano player, too.

I'm from Chicago, I live in Chicago and I wanted very much for the music in Chicago to succeed.

Washington D.C. and the entire DMV area are very dope places because they're such musically-inclined areas.

I'm a New Zealand actor, and I really want to be doing our stuff here, and our stuff includes plays from overseas. In terms of survival, maybe I should have taken a shot elsewhere at some point, but it gets back to the same theme - we should have our own people telling our own stories.

You should find the dopest producer in your area, and that producer is always going to want songs written to his beat.

We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do.

I grew up in Birmingham, Ala. Nobody really blow up from Birmingham, Ala.

Silicon Valley isn't the only game in town. Tech is increasingly decentralized. Around the world, new tech centers with younger companies are able to embrace a different approach to talent: recruit locally, identify homegrown prospects and, in a phrase, bring them along for the ride.

A lot of true Jamaican artists don't understand the importance of radio so tend not to tap into that as a result.

Everyone in Norman knew our block. There were five kids in our neighborhood who started at QB in high school. We had Division-I athletes from a number of sports available to play at any moment.

You always get that energy, you just want to be heard, to go out, do your thing and show people that we have just as much talent here as everywhere else.

I remember being in the States a few years ago, and when I said I was from Toronto, it doesn't really make a difference. Now you say you're from Toronto, and people want to talk to you a little longer. Drake's putting on and bringing a lot of eyes to the city, but I feel like the seed and the flowers have always been here.

People in Scotland appreciate homegrown talent, but it's getting harder and harder to get films made in Britain.

I come from an era where you just build something. Me and Common built what we built from Chicago from scratch.

Come on down to the speakin' tonight!

I played in garage bands and rock and roll bands when I was in junior high and high school and saw some of the great talents of all time in the local area where I lived.

These people shred. That's what I was saying about Nashville-you can go to an open mic night at the Holiday Inn and probably see more talented musicians than the ones touring. When we first came down here I was like, "Wow I'm glad we didn't cut our teeth down here, there's so much competition." You're being challenged constantly because you're surrounded by these amazing musicians.

The younger generation of filmmakers is concerned about our roots, rather than making films with characters plucked out of the cloud or some English DVD. Actually since 2000, Tamil cinema is going through some positive changes.

He was a manager, one of the singers, I guess talent coordinator for the local talent in Harlem. His name was Lover Patterson. He was living right across the street from where my dad had his restaurant. I guess he saw a lot of kids come in, a lot of my buddies.

If somebody's in the community doing cool stuff, we'll hire them.