North London Sayings

#1. Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.

Anthony Horowitz

#2. When I was 16, I used to hang out at the Nambucca pub in North London and see The Libertines play live.

Jamie Campbell Bower

#3. I was always a sports nut but I've lost interest now in whether one bunch of mercenaries in north London is going to beat another bunch of mercenaries from west London.

John Cleese

#4. The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it ... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.

Zadie Smith

#5. Well, it's like this," began Mother, "When you die you go and live in another part of London. And that's it." ~ North London Book of the Dead

Will Self

#6. I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

Mark Billingham

#7. I was brought up in a flat in North London - virtually the last building in London, because north of us was countryside all the way to the coast, and south of us was non-stop London for 20 miles.

Jim Crace

#8. When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.

Jim Crace

#9. I'm just a very normal person, living in north London, doing my best for my area and to put forward some serious debate on issues in the party.

Jeremy Corbyn

#10. I was born in North London in 1947. I didn't learn to read until I was almost 8-partly bad schooling, and partly I suspect slight dyslexic problems. My father, driven mad by this, taught me to read. At 9 I began writing.

Tanith Lee

#11. I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, found a room in a shared house in North London, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency.

Christopher Fowler

#12. My parents are from north London, and so it's not like I'm some Yank who wants to make a profit out of football. I don't care about making money. I just want to see Spurs succeed and, if I can help, that's great.

Steve Nash

#13. I went to comprehensive school in North London and left without any qualifications [diploma]. And I was doing bits of acting and improv in a drama club in the evenings. Then I discovered you didn't need qualifications to go to art school, you just needed a body of work.

Joe Wright

#14. I'm not particularly a football fan, but I live in north London, and I can hear when Arsenal score, and it's fantastically exciting. Down the road you can hear the roar.

Mike Newell

#15. I was living in my lovely little two-bedroom flat in north London ... and suddenly, I couldn't just walk down the street and buy a pint of milk.

Kate Winslet

#16. If you're a kid at a secondary comprehensive in North London as I was in the seventies, prancing around doing acting and being a luvvie wasn't really a good idea for your personal security.

Steve McFadden

#17. Can it be the old devil's house? I've heard he has a house in North London.

G.K. Chesterton

#18. If I did a TV show, it would have to be in North London because I'm a bit of a homebody, and my work takes me away from home enough. But yeah absolutely. Television has never been more exciting than it is now.

Simon Pegg

#19. I'm always afraid someone's going to tap me on the shoulder one day and say, 'Back to North London.'

Alan Parker

#20. As a child, growing up in Hampstead, North London, I was shockingly fair-skinned. Holidays involved me spending the second and third day face-down on a bed, shrieking should anyone touch my blistered skin.

Jane Green

#21. When I was a little kid it was my dream to go to drama school, but it was never something I thought would happen to me. I was a Jewish girl from North London and things like that don't happen to Jewish girls from North London called Amy Winehouse.

Amy Winehouse

#22. My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.

John Oliver

#23. London and the south-east of England are very crowded spaces. Wherever a new runway is placed, thousands will be affected. Residents in nearby Longford, Harmondsworth and Sipson, which lie to the north of Heathrow, face having their homes compulsorily purchased for land to build the new runway.

Tim Bowler

#24. I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London.

Jane Green

#25. I grew up in North Yorkshire, but now London is home.

James Norton

#26. In North America, more than half of all children travel to school by bus. We need a similar programme in London.

Zac Goldsmith

#27. Before London swallowed it whole, Camden Town was the fork in the road best known for a coaching inn called the Mother Red Cap. It served as a last-chance stop for beer, highway robbery and gonorrhoea before heading north into the wilds of Middlesex.

Ben Aaronovitch

#28. My first record was made in Termonfeckin, which is a small town on the north-east coast of Ireland. I had been in London, but it didn't click. So, at home, I didn't think about making something, just whether something could be made. There was no grand plan.

James Vincent McMorrow

#29. There are few places in my life that I've found more ruggedly beautiful than the Highlands of Scotland. The place is magical - it's so far north, so remote, that sometimes it feels like you've left this world and gone to another.

Julia London

#30. I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.

David Bowie

#31. I live in Leeds, which is about 200 miles north of London, and I get to go and do all the 'Harry Potter' stuff and make great films and be part of this wonderful thing all around the world, and then I get to go home and chill out with my friends in Leeds and go watch the football and go to the pub.

Matthew Lewis

#32. My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there - I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen's butler.

John Oliver

#33. By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour.

Bill Bryson

#34. With the single exception of Park Lane, every north-south route in London slows traffic to the pace of a wounded gnat with pleurisy struggling with a squaddie's backpack.

Michael Gove

#35. When I was growing up in north-west London, our milkman's cart was pulled by a horse, and cattle still grazed on the meadows near Church Farm.

Clive Sinclair

#36. It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

Philip Reeve

#37. I'm the co-chair of the PTA at my kids' school, Ashmount Primary, in north Islington, London.

Arabella Weir