I come from Detroit where it’s rough and I’m not a smooth talker.

I like the city. I like the concrete. I like big business. I like being a CEO of my own company and having a lot of responsibilities. At the same time, when I can go off with a backpack or off on a surfboard or even off on a run somewhere in the woods – that’s where I’m really happy.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

With all the travel we’re doing to cold-weather cities, your mind definitely starts to wander. It gets you away from the game. Even when you arrive in a city, you’re tempted to just sit in your hotel and rest. Sometimes it’s nice to just get out and walk around, to see what’s there.

I grew up in a funny way.

I live in Hollywood, but you can’t make me love Hollywood. I’ll never love Hollywood.

One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn’t move to New York to make a fortune.

I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of.

Oh, my mama was awesome. Very strict, overreligious, loved the Lord, loved rules. But she had to be that way because of where we were growing up, the neighborhood I was from.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto – I tell people you don’t have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up.

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

For me, being raised in a free America made all the difference.

I didn’t have a father figure in the house.

I grew up in an environment where being polite was taken as a weakness. So I just fought everybody.

I grew up in San Francisco. And so I’m informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I’m a very ardent patriot.

In my heart, I’m just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I’m not a rich man.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

My mother never cursed at home; my father never cursed at home. My father didn’t drink. Even though we were poor, we would say a blessing over the table. So that’s who I am.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

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

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that’s where a lot of preachers‘ kids get off base sometimes. Because they don’t see the same things at both places.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.

My parents weren’t actors or studio executives.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

My mother would kill me if I posed nude! My mother raised me with certain standards.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago – by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.

The truth is, I’m just a rough old New Zealander who has enjoyed many challenges in his life.

I grew up cursing a lot.

My father was a negative person. He actually taught me to be negative, if that makes any sense. I remember him saying: ‚You know there’s no point in expecting anything good to happen because it won’t.‘ I grew up in such a negative atmosphere.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

I grew up around lots of men – my father, my brothers, my uncles – so I wasn’t intimidated by them.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‚call attention to yourself,‘ or ‚think you were smart.‘ My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.

I grew up cursing a lot. It felt natural. My parents told me to stop.

Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That’s something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.

I was raised by a mother who told me I was great every day of my life.

In London, you’ll be walking around and, ‚Oh, there’s the ground.‘ Every area of the city has a Premier League club. They all survive; they all exist with enough money, and that’s good.

My mom is very religious – Catholic – and from a young age they brought me to the church.

I don’t believe in honors – it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way.

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

When you’re on the road and moving city to city, when someone isn’t there at the end of the night, you feel empty.

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

I remember coming to New York in 1974 to do a play here called ‚Equis.‘ And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets, and I thought, ‚I’m home.‘ I felt really at peace here.

My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home – I think in those days we called them arguments – about who was right and who was wrong.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn’t afford to pay attention.

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that’s – those are humbling times, you know?

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.