London Quotes: Capturing the Essence of the Iconic City

"It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom"

Jonathan Swift, Writer

"If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

"Hitler bombed London into submission but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity"

Tom Paulin, Poet

"London is a modern Babylon"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

"I wake up every morning and I feel like I'm juggling glass balls. I live in Los Angeles, my business is run out of London, and most evenings I'm cuddled up in front of Skype, in my dressing gown, speaking with my studio in London. I travel a lot, my team travel a lot, but I wouldn't have it any other way"

Victoria Beckham, Musician

"The first song is called "London." It's about two Russian soldiers who desert the Russian army and escape to London, where they indulge in a life of crime"

Neil Tennant, Musician

"I worked in rep for six years, then I came to London and to the National Theatre. What's better than that?"

Imelda Staunton, Actress

"In London, the weather would affect me negatively. I react strongly to light. If it is cloudy and raining, there are clouds and rain in my soul"

Jerzy Kosinski, Novelist

"I started noticing how stained the pavements are in London. The pavements in Beverly Hills aren't used; in London, they're used for everything. It doesn't matter how much they're cleaned, they still reflect light"

Julie Christie, Actress

"When I was flying to Rome, we flew over London; I felt like bursting into tears. It's part of me, so I can't leave London behind for good"

Robert Pattinson, Actor

"When I come to London, I always like to see what's playing at the NFT"

Walter Salles, Director

"My parents are from Manchester but I was brought up in London, Camden Town"

Sadie Frost, Actress

"Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score"

Mark Mothersbaugh, Musician

"All over London as one walks, one everywhere, in the season, sees oranges to sell; and they are in general sold tolerably cheap, one and even sometimes two for a halfpenny; or, in our money, threepence"

Karl Philipp Moritz, Author

"When I came back from filming 'Abduction', I told my agent: I'm staying in London now. If it takes doing children's theater from the back of a van in Kilburn, that's OK. I need to be with my family. My job is to keep the family together and provide for them"

Jason Isaacs, Actor

"On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb"

Siobhan Davies, Dancer

"On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy"

Carroll Quigley, Writer

"I think I would say 'The King's Speech' is surprisingly funny, in fact the audiences in London, Toronto, LA, New York commented there's more laughter in this film than in most comedies, while it is also a moving tear-jerker with an uplifting ending"

Tom Hooper, Director

"The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income"

George Bernard Shaw, Dramatist

"I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London"

Ambrose Bierce, Journalist

"London is a roost for every bird"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

"America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub"

C. Wright Mills, Sociologist

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

Samuel Johnson, Author

"You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford"

Samuel Johnson, Author

"By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show"

Samuel Johnson, Author

"The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo"

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist

"He comes to London and gets a job in a nightclub, a gay club, where he's known as Straight Dave by the bar staff - and no one believes he's as straight as he claims to be. He meets the daughter of the club manager, and he has an affair with her"

Neil Tennant, Musician

"The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as more recent attacks in Madrid, Spain, and London, England, showed in a very tragic way just how vulnerable many areas of the world are to these sorts of actions"

Jo Bonner, Politician

"My cousins gay, he went to London only to find out that Big Ben was a clock"

Rodney Dangerfield, Comedian

"I studied for my degree in London and consequently ended up spending five years away from Cornwall. I deliberately moved away from the coast to experience a different way of life"

John Dyer, Artist

"It must have been an extraordinary time. I guess the worrying thing about musical theatre to me, is if you look at the London season this year, mine is actually the only one to have come in"

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Composer

"And I had known Peter O'Toole before in London. And I'd liked him very much. And the thought of being in a picture with him was very challenging to me. And he was playing the starring role"

Anthony Quinn, Actor

"My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

"A man may learn from his Bible to be a more thorough gentleman than if he had been brought up in all the drawing-rooms in London"

Charles Kingsley, Clergyman

"The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Writer

"The first Superman film took up a huge chunk of our lives, but it was a wonderful time for us. We were young, my daughter was little, we were filming in London for a year, so we became like a close family"

Margot Kidder, Actress

"To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke"

Alvin Toffler, Author

"The space and light up there in Norfolk is wonderfully peaceful. I find myself doing funny things like gardening, and cooking, which I rarely do in London"

Jeremy Northam, Actor

"I had studied theater for three years in London when someone suggested me for the role"

Orlando Bloom, Actor

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