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

I grew up in a funny way.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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

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 can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

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.‘

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.

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 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.

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 parents weren’t actors or studio executives.

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.

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

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

I grew up cursing a lot.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

You see some of the weirdest people in Detroit casinos.

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

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.

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?

To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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