Quotes About Contrast

You see airbrushed images of me, but I know the person who's walking barefoot, dodging dog poo in the yard.

In L.A., I have more of a yard existence, and so I enjoy walking my two little dogs in New York - one's a Maltese and the other's a Shih Tzu.

'Atlanta' is Wild West-y - every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules. There's no single narrative. At the outer edges, the overgrown parking lots and project blocks, the city is a few yards away from apocalypse, and if you slow down, it could engulf you.

Take a walk around many of our cities and you will find areas of deprivation, high worklessness and educational failure only yards from areas of prosperity and employment.

Yeah, we're sweet but savage, and I think a lot of Canadians are that way.

Yeah, the New York Times is very intellectual and very, very prestigious, but it doesn't reach the market that People magazine does.

I got 'Reign In Blood' for Easter one year - how ironic is that?

I spend a lot of time in L.A., and when it rains there you get the entire rainfall for the year in two days, raindrops the size of mangoes. And in Barcelona, the Mediterranean storms come up from the sea, thunder and lightning; it's like the end of the world.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

My dad grew up in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, desperate to get to London. I grew up in London, so I don't know what it's like to yearn for the big city from a small town.

When you live in Manchester and it's raining every day, you've got to imagine the sun sometimes. When you're brought up in concrete, you aim for the green leaves. And when you get to the green leaves, you yearn again for concrete.

I spend a fair chunk of time in Los Angeles, and after about ten days of warmth and unbroken clear skies, you start to yearn for a bit of good old British gloom and rain!

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

As for what I listen to after writing, it could be anything - but I've noticed that if the current book contains music from one tradition, it is music from another tradition that most relaxes me.

There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.

The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.

My Dublin wasn't the Dublin of sing-songs, traditional music, sense of history and place and community.

You might think of Hollywood as this full-on glamorous thing and to us it was like, 'All right, mom's got an audition. Do you want to sit in traffic for 50 minutes and go in with her?'

Delhi came as a shock. There were so many people, and oh, the traffic.

In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment.

I usually go out riding late at night when there's no traffic because L.A. has become almost like the Philippines now as far as traffic.

I've done two Shakespeare tragedies, so I'd desperately like to do comedy. It would be nice not to die.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.