Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it's always in the form of someone homeless. 'Look at that guy - he's crazy. He looks dangerous.' Well, he's on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home.
You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.
When I thought about Detroit, I would think big city, very urban - not a lot of places to walk around, not a lot of parks. I sort of pictured Manhattan almost, where, besides Central Park, it's all city and big buildings. But now that I'm here, you see people pushing strollers, people hanging out in the park.
I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.
The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.
In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life.
In Brussels, you are able to have a lot of appointments in a day. In Paris, you can have one, two, maybe three, but you spend all your time on the road, in the car or in the suburbs. In Brussels, everything is easy. It's not a very big city, and the people are very quiet and warm.
I guess I just always had this idea that I would go to Hollywood. I had the typical 'get up and go' attitude that you have to have in order to make the brave step into the big city.
Here in the big city people spend their time thinking about work and about money; they don't give some value to friendships and it can be depressing.
You can learn a lot when you play in a little town in Holland or Western Australia, and you learn different things than you would learn playing a big city.