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

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

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

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

I realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

You see some of the weirdest people in Detroit casinos.

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

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

There are a lot of good women in New York.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he’s an American child.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

My mother raised me with God. We were poor financially, but we were rich spiritually.

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 was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

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

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.

People are really talkative in New York. Someone always comes up to me and says ‚Hi‘ during the day.

From when I was born to when I was 21, I never left Toronto. That’s why I’m such a city cat.

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

What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The ‚take control of things‘ mode, the ‚be careful, watch out‘ mode, the ‚speed‘ mode – the ‚Red Bull‘ mode, actually. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s all part of what we are.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

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.

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.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

The city is a body and a mind – a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information.

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.

I grew up cursing a lot.

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 have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

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.

My parents weren’t actors or studio executives.

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

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

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

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.

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.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

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.

I grew up in a funny way.

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.

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.

I have a lot of other stuff to accomplish before I get to kids. Whenever the time is right, I’ll just know. If I had a girl, she’d probably be really rebellious. She would be like a bundle of karma. I would love to bring them up in Barbados.

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

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 didn’t have a father figure in the house.

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

My upbringing was solid because of the people I had around me.