Quotes About Edinburgh

I was twelve when I went to boarding school in Edinburgh.

I feel at home in Scotland and go back whenever I can. I've played the Edinburgh Festival twice, and I get the train across the Forth Bridge to Lochgelly, just to see it.

My accent is... sort of an Edinburgh sort of soft southwest Scottish accent. It could almost be English.

Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath.

I was acting before I was modelling, when I was very young, doing the Edinburgh Festival and that sort of stuff.

In 1994 I was doing a two-hander with Sean Lock in Edinburgh and there were more people in the cast than the audience. It was pretty grim, quite a chastening experience.

Quite a few vampires, especially the elders, regarded those who creep through graveyard shadows in batwing capes and fingerless black gloves as an Edinburgh gentleman might look upon a Yankee with a single Scots grandparent who swathes himself in kilts and tartan sashes, prefaces every remark with quotes from Burns or Scott and affects a fondness for bagpipes and haggis.

I was at Edinburgh doing history of art, Spanish and Arabic. I was originally supposed to do Italian instead of Arabic but when I went to see one of the lecturers they told me I should really do something more curveball. So I did.

This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.

We are spoilt for beauty in Edinburgh, it's so close to the sea and the mountains.

After a rest in Edinburgh, where, passing a music-shop, I heard some blind man playing a mazurka of mine.

My first ideas of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) arose with my Ph.D. in Edinburgh University in the early 1950s. Supervised by Alan Beatty, my research was based on his work on altering chromosomal complements in mouse embryos.

Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.

Me and Greg Davies once shared a whole jar of pesto, neat, during the Edinburgh festival years ago because we had no food in the flat.

There is no doubt in my mind at all. The Duke of Edinburgh has had affairs - yes, full-blown affairs, and more than one.

The most touching epitaph I ever encountered was on the tombstone of the printer of Edinburgh. It said simply: He kept down the cost and set the type right.

For some time, Scotland's greatest exports to England have included whisky and Scottish MPs. Or, in the case of Charles Kennedy, both. All these links, politically, economically, culturally, are part of my Union. Would Glasgow's brilliant Commonwealth Games or the Edinburgh Festival be any better for our being independent? I doubt it.

I started studying business and finance in Edinburgh as a backup plan. I was still making music many hours a day, and when I was at university, the electronic music boom started really taking off globally.

I am proud of Edinburgh's status as a financial centre, but where is it on the index of global financial centres? Sixty-fourth. Below Hamilton, Casablanca and Mauritius. London, by contrast, is second only to New York. That's a link worth keeping.

I had a complicated life until I was 25. I was born in Bristol and was brought up by my mum and my stepfather in Edinburgh. He introduced me to books.

My upbringing has always been quite equal in terms of cultural influences. But it's unlikely that anything could prepare you for a job that involves belting out Proclaimers songs on camera, in Edinburgh and in public.

I find Edinburgh a stimulating place in which to live, with it being a city of contrasts, both architecturally and socially, and each district having a definite character.

I was spotted in Glasgow and asked to enter a competition to find the Highland Spring Face of 1995 by the Storm agency. I won the Edinburgh heat, then I won the title in London and moved there aged 16.

The same critics who destroyed 'Seven Streams' when we opened in Edinburgh - and yes, it was horrible - called it one of the most important shows of the 21st century six years later in London.