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London Quotes

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London Quotes

“it's a weird thing with acting and it happens to a lot of actors, not just myself - it's like you're giving off an I really need to be loved today vibe. My worst moment recently is I fell asleep on the tube in London on the Victoria line 8:30 in the morning and I woke up and there were about five people with iPhones taking pictures.”

“[Gilda Radner] was in the in vitro fertilization program, and it nearly, nearly drove us apart, too. She wanted that baby, so badly, and it didn't work. Oddly enough, when we were doing "Haunted Honeymoon" in London, she did become pregnant for about 10 days, but then she lost it. But, anyway, my odyssey with Gilda was wonderful, funny, torturous, painful and sad. It was - it went the full gamut.”

“The United States are a miracle: the division between two states is sometimes a river or a mountain, and sometimes it's a straight line. But nobody says, "That tree really belongs in South Carolina. I shan't do anything about it now, I'll get it back later." I shall go after I am here to London and after that to Potsdam, where Comrade Stalin, Mr Churchill and Harry Truman divided up Europe; and what we see now is the result of that. The Americans would have accepted it. But Europeans don't accept anything.”

“What happened was I was invited to meet Tom [Hardy] to discuss a project that he had in his mind about an adventurer who returns to England from Africa with secrets and with a history, and the original idea was set some 80 years later than it is now. But in the conversation I really took to the idea and I'd wanted for a while to set something in 1830 and 1840 in London, so it struck a chord.”

“The great thing about London is the little pockets of culture, like Hackney, which has its panto and its great community. Of course there's also the West End with its brilliant theatres and thriving tourism but to also have areas like Hackney which are so community based but not exclusive, that remind you that those surrounding you are the most important, is what makes London what it is.”

“It is almost impossible to open a newspaper without reading something about the London housing market. House prices are rising at such a rate that the vast majority of Londoners can't afford to buy, are being forced out of the boroughs they grew up in, or in the worst cases, are being made homeless. If nothing is done, people will continue to be driven out of the city and London will cease to be a hub for creativity and entrepreneurship.”

“Too often, the perspectives on housing come from journalists, politicians and property experts, with a focus on the extreme ends of the market. Through the FOURWALLS Film Project, we want to get an accurate picture of the London housing situation through the eyes of the people that live there, and promote discussion around it.”

“We need find the space to build more affordable homes in the city. That involves a number of different policy responses. For example, I've spoken about the need to rethink the greenbelt - the protected land around the edge of London that was originally intended to be protected and retained as an area of natural beauty but in many cases is neither natural nor beautiful.”

“If you've been to the city of Malmo in Sweden, or to Berlin or to Hamburg or to London or to Paris in the suburbs, or Rotterdam in my own country. You see many cities where there is a city within a city - where even today in the United Kingdom - I don't know if you're aware of that - there are even sharia courts active, whether it's rulings that the worth of a woman is half of that of a man.”

“We had a completely deniable exchange of papers - in the winter before the 1997 election - with [Tony] Blair, setting out what we thought were the realistic parameters for a solution: and we were getting reasonable responses back from him. That's what led to Blair's visit to Belfast on May 16, 1997 - two weeks after he became Prime Minister and his first official visit outside London.”

“I was a carpenter in Northern Vermont and got this tax refund check that just about covered a one-way airfare to London. So this I saw as a sign from God. So I went over to see Ray [Hussett] for a couple of weeks and ended up staying 10 years. I got work as a stage carpenter at the Oval House in Kennington, South London.”

“My mother found a way out of a little one-bedroom apartment in Athens, Greece to bring Arianna to Cambridge to study economics and bring me to the Royal Academy in London with very few financial resources and no connections. She didn't know anybody in England, but she found a way. Her love for her daughters and seeing what they could be, motivated her and gave her the chutzpah, the courage, to break down barriers. When you have the motivation of love, you will find the way.”

“What Brighton's got is a major sea port on either side, good for importing drugs, great for exporting cash, stolen cars, stolen antiques. It's got the largest number of antique shops in the UK, so it's a great place to fence stolen goods. It's got tremendous communication: you've got the sea ports, you've got the channel tunnel, you've got Gatwick Airport 25 minutes away, and London's 50 minutes away by train. So all these escape routes... Which is what villains like.”

“If you and I took a walk down a shopping street in Jo'burg or Cape Town or London, we see two guys looking in a shop window, we think, "Oh, they're wondering what they're going to buy." A cop looks at them and thinks, "Why are they standing there? Are they doing a drug deal? Are they going to mug someone? Are they going to rob the shop?"”

“In London I'm not seen in public. I don't go to award ceremonies or gatherings. I just don't go because I like my privacy. I like being with my family and I like being in their company. I work very hard and I don't have much time so I just want to be with my family or in the English countryside. I don't take holidays.”

“We've got characters in the UK like Boris Johnson, who's kind of like a proto Trump in many ways even down to the crazy blonde hair. Then Mayor of London, now Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson was widely seen as a cartoonish oaf and that made him strangely undentable as a politician. No one could land a blow on him because he was already ridiculous.”

“It's not by coincidence that a lot of protesters against the new presidency in America and in front of the Trump Tower, even in London... the protesters were 90 percent women. The image of the woman and the problem of the woman still exists. Not exactly in the same terms as 200 hundred years ago, but we still have the problem here.”

“You ask why London has to 'stand for' anything. One response is that in fact it always inevitably does. One could say at the moment it stands for a complex mix of multiculturalism and financial power. Interestingly, that is a political mix of progressive and oppressive. What I'm arguing is simply that we should take responsibility for the effects of 'our place' around the world. To take responsibility for our embeddedness. If you don't want to, so be it. It does demand an imaginative engagement with our planetary interdependence and that can be quite challenging.”

“Though people could, in principle, cross national borders to reach places where their work is more highly rewarded, they are in fact prevented from doing so. As a result, huge differences also persist in the price of labor, as you can see when you get a haircut in rural India or hire a driver or babysitter in Bolivia. You can easily buy such services at one-fiftieth the price you would pay in London, Hamburg or Manhattan.”

“I see no real argument in Britain that is concerned that an Indian company owns our most successful car manufacturer or that the sewer system under London is being renewed in part by Chinese investment. There are the odd voices that express concern but they are very marginal and they are not being listened to by the British people.”

“In fact, when Bernard [Leach] would be called away to go up to London for something and we'd be living alone for a couple of days, we would dig into the storage areas in the house and we'd get out all the pots that we might not see in the course of our daily life, because we weren't using them in the house on a steady basis. But we found some fantastic pots in there tucked away, and we could look at them and examine them and handle them.”

“Bernard [Leach] had acquired many [Shoji] Hamada works. Some of them, it was interesting - first of all, Hamada worked in St. Ives for about four years before returning to Japan to start his own pottery. He had exhibitions in London, and if these exhibitions didn't sell out, the galleries were instructed to send the remaining work down to the Leach Pottery, where they would go into the showroom for sale. If Bernard saw one that hadn't sold that he really admired, then he would take it (he would buy it), and it would go into the house.”

“Friends of Bernard's [Leach] came to visit, and when we went to London, we were given introductions to people like Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Richard Batram. All these people were, let's say, made available to us by a friendship with Leach. In addition there was a potter's group - what was it called? I think it was called the Cornish Potters Society, but I'm not sure of that. Anyway, they had meetings and we would go with Leach to these meetings and meet other potters, and they would have programs where they would discuss pottery and people would interchange ideas.”