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.

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.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

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.

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

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 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.

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years.

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.

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

I wasn’t allowed to go to movies when I was kid; my father was a minister. 101 Dalmatians and King of Kings, that was the extent of it.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There are a lot of good women in New York.

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

My upbringing in Canada made me the person I am. I will always be proud to be a Canadian.

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.

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 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.

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.

Being brought up very religious, I have a fear of people that look to idol gods.

You see some of the weirdest people in Detroit casinos.

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 come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.‘

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