London Quotes

I would use the power of procurement, I would say if you want to do business with the mayor of London, you must pay your staff a London Living Wage.

I grew up in a small town about 40 miles outside London, but it was a fairly cosmopolitan household.

Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.

I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.

One day in 1965 Rajiv wrote me from London, where he was studying, and informed me, 'You're always asking me about girls, whether I have a special girl, and so forth. Well, I've met a special girl.' And when Rajiv returned to India, I asked him, 'Do you still think about her in the same way?' And he said yes. But she couldn't get married until she was twenty-one, and until she was sure she'd like to live in India. Sonia is almost completely an Indian by now, even though she doesn't always wear saris.

Whenever I go to bars in London, people send me over Cosmopolitans. It's a very sweet gesture, but I don't like them, so they just sit there.

There's a hole in the world Like a great black pit And the vermin of the world Inhabit it ... And it goes by the name of London.

I live opposite an amazing wood in London, and you can usually find me sitting there for hours and sketching. Sometimes the icon or symbol leads me to the face, but usually it's the other way around.

Also, having grown up in England, you walk around London, you're passing relics that are a thousand years old - the wall of London is a thousand years old. You don't talk about it, it's part of your everyday life. The idea that people are in these environments and talking about the past and what happened, it's irrelevant. It's all about living and in this world it was about surviving.

After studying in Sheffield, I went down to London to do my post-graduate degree at the National Film and Television School, embarking on the movie that would eventually become 'A Grand Day Out.

London is like a dream come true. As I ramble through it I am haunted by the curious feeling of something half-forgotten, but still dimly remembered, like a reminiscence of some previous state of existence. It is at once familiar and strange.

I can't abide cats myself, but of course we have to have one in the kitchen to deal with the mice. I insisted on getting a black one, because anything else shows the dirt so in London.

I haven't been back to London for 40 years to do a play, so to play Madame Arcati there, she would be tickled to death knowing that that was what I was doing. I hope she would. She was a wonderfully unique and very special, very darling woman.

At home, I hardly ever leave London. I don't like the countryside in England.

Fog and hypocrisy - that is to say, shadow, convention, decency - these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.

London, with its monotonous and melancholy houses, seems like an inharmonious patchwork, as if pieced together without design. Yet it is lovable in its sprawling confusion.

London is the sporting capital of the world. I say to the Chinese and I say to the world, ping pong is coming home.

There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.

London, thou art the flower of cities all! Gemme of all joy, jasper of jocunditie.

Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London.

Audiences in London called me the girl with the black cherry eyes.

My first paid job was delivering newspapers. The first paid acting job I got was dressing up as Edam cheese and handing out leaflets on London's Oxford Street. I got pushed over by these little herberts and given a good shoe-in.

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.

All we ever got in those [early] days was "Where are you from? Liverpool? You'll have to be in London before you can do it. Nobody's ever done it from Liverpool.

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.

The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I was just standing in the street, a bit dazzled by an Antonioni bus wipe, which by the way are inherent in London, and I imagined a film set in London starting out with the riff from The Yardbird's "Heart Full of Soul", and now, how ever many years later, I've done it.

I kind of feel that once we're back in London and back in regular life, I just sort of get the bus and very occasionally this whole other role [ in Chronicels of Narnia] slips into my home life. Randomly people recognise me but even then it's very minor. It's not as if my life has been turned on its head and I can't walk down the street unless I'm wearing dark sunglasses and a ninja kit.

They’re a nasty bunch of people. The Riot Club’s sole purpose is to celebrate wealth, elitism, hedonism, and excess - just random acts of destruction and chauvinism, which is interesting because our Prime Minister, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Mayor of London were are a part of this club.

When I was younger, my father was in the Foreign Service and we lived in Nigeria, Panama, and London, but for the most part I grew up in the South and D.C. I got the travel bug as a little person and I've bounced around a lot.

In the early '60s there was very little reliable information on Tibetan Buddhism. I was living in London and I had joined the Buddhist Society. For the most part, people there were either interested in Theravada or Zen Buddhism. There was almost no one into Tibetan Buddhism at that time.

The first time I came to London on my own, I was 15. I was absolutely oblivious to so many things. I had no expectations, no fears. I just came to do a National Youth Theatre season one summer. It was just brilliant.

Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock & roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an inspiration to generations of weird Southern kids.

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.

I'd never have written the big books in London.

In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.

I know my Beijing medal has been a watershed moment in the history of Indian boxing , but personally speaking, I would like to better it in London.

It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them. The walls of London may be battered, but the spirit of the Londoner stands resolute and undismayed.

To play today in London, next week in Madrid and the week after that in Warsaw is a bit better than playing Newark and Baltimore and Philadelphia. I've been doing that for 20 years.

My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background, is that when people are down and out, that's when they're probably the funniest. They have to be. That's what they do to cope, to find joy, cause they don't feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.

What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

The color and spectacle of Mexico's streets sparked my interest in community driven space and experience, a passion that I began to develop while studying architecture at Syracuse University and then at the Architectural Association School in London. Having been immersed in such a diverse array of lively environments, it would be impossible for me not to use these memories and experiences as inspiration for my work.

... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

Whoe'er has gone thro' London street, Has seen a butcher gazing at his meat, And how he keeps Gloating upon a sheep's Or bullock's personals, as if his own; How he admires his halves And quarters--and his calves, As if in truth upon his own legs grown.

The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer's morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. Fifty years on, I don't associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out, middle-aged military kind of man in a stained raincoat slammed a handful of mixed foreign change on to the bar and in gritty Irish accents ordered himself as much Scotch as it would buy. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born. Or so my memory, not always a reliable informant, tells me.

Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation's prayer ever in dumb music ascending.

In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.