Urban Diversity Quotes

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Hackney gets a bit of a bad rap, but it's the only place I've ever lived that felt like a community. I know my neighbours.

It's a lot of wonderful things about the Bay area and Oakland that I absolutely love. I wouldn't change being from there by any stretch.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

New York isn't segregated the way many American cities are, where there are specific ethnic neighborhoods that don't necessarily co-exist, or they co-exist but in a much separate sense.

Somalis have made my city of Wilmington, Delaware, [their home] on a smaller scale. There is a large, very identifiable Somali community, i might add if you ever come to the train station with me you'll notice I have great relationships with them because there's an awful lot driving cabs and are friends of mine. For real. I'm not being solicitous. I'm being serious.

Everywhere you look in L.A., you're reminded of what you're a part of - or what you're not a part of. And everyone you meet is talking about the same thing all the time.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

I always have a positive reaction to Times Square - you've got so many people passing through here, so many cultures, and so many people merging into the central community of New York City. This is the hub of America.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

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.

Los Angeles is many places in one place.

Seattle is like a global gumbo, a melting pot with all kinds of people - the rich, the poor, white people, some Chinese, Filipino, Jewish and black people - they're all here.

On a bus, your eyes, ears, and pores are open absorbing in the variety, the wonder, and the magic of the city. It's a wonderful way to get to know the city.

Cities can be paradoxical places. In the mornings they buzz with commuters, in the evenings they come alive with diners and partygoers, at weekends the streets fill with shoppers and market traders. But amidst the hustle and bustle, even the greatest city can be a lonely place.

When you go back to 'Friends,' and you look at that as New York, there's no black people. That's not real. You're in New York City, and there's no black people at all. That's a little funny.

In Manhattan, and its true on some level till this day; its a whole different mentality from the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, which I didn't know at the time - because you basically just know your neighborhood.

It's important to me that there's not just one story told about our city. 'LSD' is an ode to Chicago, a song for the complicated love I have for my city.

New York has a thousand universes in it that don't always connect but we do all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the Post, read the same writings on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don't.

I love the infinite variety of New York, how it's the epicenter of so many worlds.

East Side, West Side, all around the town

There's a lot about New York that is unique, and there's always a culture and a subculture going on everywhere.

In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics - all with their own markets.

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East.