Soho Quotes

I have a long history with Soho: even when I was at art college, I came down to Soho to work in the summer.

I used to go to Saks, I would go to Bergdorf, I would go to Barneys, I would go to thrift stores in SoHo.

Oliver liked to play the part of disaffected youth, but he liked shopping in SoHo even more.

I don't like the idea that one hotel could be better than another. In any city, I try to find a hotel that has the identity of that place - Claridge's in London, the Danieli or Cipriani in Venice. In New York, I stay at the Mercer Hotel; it is so much in the character of SoHo.

People come from all over the world to see this little place they've seen in movies and read about in history books: Soho.

As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death."

On my Instagram, I'm always keeping a record of things being pulled down in Soho and shutters being closed. Every city - and London more than anywhere - has got to be a vibrant mix of all different things. We can't allow it to become a monoculture.

You know obviously a big TV or film break would be lovely, but I find that I’m essentially a theatre trained actor and that’s what I love doing. I love fringe theatres in London, I love theatres like the Royal Court, Soho and the National obviously and if I could work in any of those and be a jobbing actor for a while then I’m very lucky.

I walked around Soho's street for over an hour, running into familiar faces but never once stopping to chat. It was then that I felt something discomforting and comforting all at once. I didn't want to be here, in this city, anymore.

Things are very different now because a lot of those little clubs don't exist. In Soho for instance, where nearly half my nightlife photographs were taken, it's rapidly changing. There isn't the same after dark frisson of excitement about the place any more.

London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.

Every day you run into artists on the streets in SoHo or other creative people you want to do something with. There's nothing to match that chance encounter.

I met her in a club down in North Soho, where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola.

Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones.

Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighborhood in New York.

Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.

I got in before SoHo was SoHo. It was just Little Italy when I was in there. It's still off the touristy track. It's just away from the Saturday action, the crowds and everything. It's too expensive. It's insane. You've got to be a billionaire to live on Manhattan now.

For me, growing up in Harlem and then migrating down to SoHo and the Lower East Side and chillin' down there and making that my stomping ground... That was a big thing, because I'm from Harlem, and downtown is more artsy and also more open-minded. So I got the best of both worlds.

I was out there for 12 days. There are more beggars in Soho than there are in Kabul.

My working hours are not that conventional. I often get up about two in the morning and do a painting, and then I'll have a bath, and then I often feel very hungry around 4am, so I'll go into Soho and have a meal somewhere like Balans. That's what I love about living here - there's always life around me.

It was the single best sexual encounter I've ever had. We were in the Soho Grand Hotel, and there was a mirror, and I was like, 'Oh my God, you're banging the girl of your dreams and you're watching it right now.'

Tessa: "A little girl robbed you?" Will: "Actually, she wasn't a little girl at all, as it turns out, but a midget in a dress with a penchant for violence, who goes by the name Six-Fingered Nigel." Jem:"Easy mistake to make." (later) Will: "I want to be back before dark. I have an assignation in Soho this evening with a certain attractive someone" Tessa: “Goodness, If you keep seeing Six-Fingered Nigel like this, he'll expect you to declare your intentions.

Out of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, Soho in particular had the charged atmosphere of a movie set, populated with passersby who looked like extras from Central Casting, so perfectly did they fit into this environment. There was the feeling of everything being not quite real, or too perfectly cliched to actually be true, and it began to rain in a fine, misty drizzle from a black patent leather sky.

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.

I am sorry the infernal Divinities, who visit mankind with diseases, and are therefore at perpetual war with Doctors, should have prevented my seeing all you great Men at Soho to-day-Lord! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, mechanical and pyrotecnical, will be on the wing, bandy'd like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! while poor I, I by myself I, imprizon'd in a post chaise, am joggled, and jostled, and bump'd, and bruised along the King's high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever!

I went to the University of Minnesota to study art. I left the university to come to New York and live in Soho. I got involved with like a small kind of like experimental theater-mime company and we discovered that Étienne Decroux, a great mime, was still teaching in Paris so I went to study with him for several years.

We were looking for someone who could get the film [Filth] made at that kind of level, with the finance we wanted, and we spoke to a lot of people. When I met James [McAvoy] in the Soho Hotel with Jon Baird, the director, he looked about ten years old. I thought there's no way he's going to be a forty-year-old divorced alcoholic cop. I thought, really lovely guy, I'll let him and John talk and see if they get on.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he will donate $45 billion of his wealth to philanthropy. Two years ago, my husband and I decided to endow $100 million to set up the SOHO China Scholars. This program will give financial aid to Chinese students so they can attend the best universities in the world.

SoHo was called Hell's Hundred Acres because it was full of sweatshops - without fire escapes. Completely not up to code. Every once in a while, these buildings would burn and 26 Puerto Ricans would be killed.