Urban Isolation Quotes

Los Angeles can be a really sad city.

When I came to New York as a writer, I was taken with the idea that you're only getting in on bridges and ferries and through tunnels. The idea behind 'Takedown' is that it would be very hard to get out.

When you go to the big city - you're in New York, Boston, you're in L.A. - you walk in the streets, and nobody says anything to you. It becomes so impersonal because there's so many people.

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.

I fell down in Hyde Park with a friend who'd had a hip operation, and neither of us could get up again. People must have thought we were a couple of drunks rolling around and walked on by.

Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever.

If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.

L.A. can be a tough city, very lonely. A lot of people move here to pursue a dream, and that's understandable. But sometimes it's hard to find genuine friends.

I'm alone, stumbling through the city in the dark, trying not to let the night freeze my blood.

Everything I hated about L.A. I'm beginning to crave. L.A. is a place where you live behind a gate, you get in a car, your interaction with the public is minimal. I used to hate that.

With 'Greenberg,' I wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles... my great love for it and also the way that I felt not at home and alienated there.

I live in a high rise with my family part of the year in New York and I don't know three quarters of the people in the building. We live in the same square-footage and I wouldn't know who they were.

In Toronto, I grew up taking a subway, I grew up taking a bus. I spent my formative adult years in New York City, walking the streets, taking the subway. You're connected to the larger whole. L.A. is so spread out, and you're so incubated inside those cars and it's so exhausting to deal with the traffic, without really having the human contact.

A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.

New York is a city where you're so alone, you're an individual, you can disappear. You can make something happen. But it's very different to make something happen in the art world.

L.A. is so isolated and unhip in a way; it gives you room to figure out who you are and explore more personal stuff.

I would never be able to live in a huge city. I'd feel like one of 100,000 people doing the same thing.

I love New York. You're never alone, but you're always on your own.

I miss the anonymity that comes with New York because everyone around you is so immersed in their own journey.

People talk about alienation in the city. Diners are a place where you feel comfortable, an extension of your house.

There's an idea that London is a planet on its own: that it's starting to diverge from the rest of the solar system. We need to combat that.

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

Reclusive? The inner city will secure your privacy better than any desert cave.