Quotes & Sayings About Mexico City

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body ... my liver ... okay, my brain ... went. — Dennis Hopper

My grandmother and my mom and my aunt Aurelia, my grandmother Juanita, my mom Lucia - we lived on the outskirts of a barrio in Mexico City called Tepito, and Tepito for many, many decades was the largest barrio in Mexico and perhaps even Latin America. — Juan Felipe Herrera

I was stationed in Turkey, Mexico City, South America, Texas, Arizona, so I do know where the Mexican-U.S. border is. — Joe Arpaio

I'm Chief Executive Officer at Art of the Olympians Museum in Fort Myers, Florida, which was founded by my Mexico City teammate Al Oerter and his wife Cathy in 2005. It shows that Olympians can have another life; we have got art from more than 100 Olympians. — Bob Beamon

Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language. — Bob Dylan

It was in 1942 and I flew from St. Louis to Mexico City. I had just gotten married and we were on our honeymoon. I hit .397 and led the Mexican League with 20 home runs and was named the MVP of the league. It's when I realized I could compete with anyone at any level. — Monte Irvin

At 10 minutes to seven on a dark, cool evening in Mexico City in 1968, John Stephen Akwari of Tanzania painfully hobbled into the Olympic Stadium-the last man to finish the marathon. The winner had already been crowned, and the victory ceremony was long finished. So the stadium was almost empty and Akwari - alone, his leg bloody and bandaged - struggled to circle the track to the finish line. When asked why he had continued the grueling struggle, the young man from Tanzania answered softly: My country did not send me 9,000 miles to start the race. They sent me 9,000 miles to finish the race. — Walter Inglis Anderson

Historically, things were moving in a pretty good direction until the Reagan presidency. And then it all got reversed. The Mexico City policy was instituted - the idea of wrecking the environment for this generation's profit and forgetting about our gets got firmly embedded. I'm sad to say the Clinton administration didn't turn it around and the Bush administration, well, I think they're the worst administration we've ever had, and I used to be a Republican. — Paul R. Ehrlich

I love Mexico because that's where I'm from, but my favorite city, whenever I need to recharge, I love Paris. I get very inspired while I'm there. There's so much art and culture, and Paris, before New York, that was the capital of the world. And I love history too, so I go there. It does something special to me. — Diego Boneta

Antonio Sanchez is from Mexico City. I met him at a Pat Metheny concert. He did a solo, and I thought, 'This is an octopus man!' — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I finally, you know, moved to Mexico City, where the film industry is. I started working there as a producer, which is a very, very valid thing for women to do, because we always produce for men, right? — Patricia Riggen

Really, Mexico City has always been this big, complex monster of a city that has always had real problems and needs, and I've always found my way through it in different ways. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

One time, I threw a candy wrapper on the street. I was with a friend who said to me, You just littered on the street! Don't you care about the environment? And I thought about it, and I said, You know what? This isn't the environment. This is New York City. New York City is not the environment. New York City is a giant piece of litter. Next to Mexico City, it's the shittiest piece of litter in the world. Just a pussy, runny, smokin', stinkin' piece of litter. — Louis C.K.

I started as a model in Mexico - I was traveling, but my base was in Mexico City. And then I studied acting for three years. — Stephanie Sigman

When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead. — Pete Hamill

You're going to see crime levels in America that are going to rival that of a Third World country. Welcome Mexico City. You're going to start seeing people being kidnapped in this country like they do in other underdeveloping nations. It's going to be very violent in America. — Gerald Celente

Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas - the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass - already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. — Edward Abbey

I went to Mexico City to visit, and I fell in love with the city. I went to my house to pick up my stuff. It was the craziest, most impulsive move I've ever done. I just felt like I had to stay there. — Julieta Venegas

I'm never going to be able to leave Mexico, really. It would be foolish of me to do it. I would be wasting such a great opportunity that the accident of life, or destiny, gave me, which is to be Mexican. If we would make 'Lord of the Rings' analogies, I think Mexico City is Middle-earth. That's where the fight of humanity is. — Gael Garcia Bernal

I attended less than two years of Conservatory in Mexico City. — Placido Domingo

For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive - Mexico City's big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change. — Rebecca Solnit

because we live in Mexico City, we make rounds with the spirits of Huitzilopochtli, — Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Where in the work of these people was love, the unmoving motor of all the stars, fixed point and vertex of the actions of men of real daring? — Daniel Saldana Paris

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting. — Barbara Kingsolver

In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. — Lester R. Brown

Mexico City is a perpetual picnic. Literally. There is a dizzying amount of wonderful food here, and the majority of it is consumed standing on one's feet, on the scarred and broken concrete sidewalk. It is dispensed from whitewashed metal stands, doled out of baskets and buckets, fried on griddles barely balanced over planks, ladled out of huge metal pots. — Nicholas Gilman

When they happen across an Adventurer from Mexico, and the ancient City he has discover'd beneath the Earth, where thousands of Mummies occupy the Streets in attitudes of Living Business, embalm'd with Gold divided so finely it flows like Gum. — Thomas Pynchon

I have this great fear of Mexico City. I won't go to Mexico City unless someone meets me at the airport and is with me. I just feel very vulnerable there. — Sandra Cisneros

[After Easy Rider] I couldn't get another movie, so I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. I didn't take any photographs, and then I went to Japan and saw a Nikon used. I bought it, and I just started, like an alcoholic. I shot 300 rolls of film. That was the beginning of me starting again ... — Dennis Hopper

What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television. — Richard Rodriguez

Los Angeles is not Mexico City, but we have many fine nightclubs and restaurants here. It is enough. One must not aim too high. — Ry Cooder

You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living. — Ray Bradbury

In New York, the European starling - now a ubiquitous avian pest from Alaska to Mexico - was introduced because someone thought the city would be more cultured if Central Park were home to each bird mentioned in Shakespeare. — Alan Weisman

No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands. — Henry Louis Gates

Here's what I was thinking about:1.Who the new threat was 2.The air show in Mexico City 3.How to get Total to quit milking his injury, because enough was enough 4. My mom and Half sister Ella 5.Fang 6.Fang 7.Fang — James Patterson

I saw what I could [in Mexico City], but we rarely got anything other than big, mainstream American films. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood - to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other then on the planet. It was the first twenty-first-century city, the first of today's modern, globalized megalopolises. — Charles C. Mann

I spent some time in France, visited Egypt and Mexico City. I hung out, biked around, planted some tomatoes. I did everything except wake up in a new town everyday. It was really boring. It's just life. — Feist

were to ask whether the writers recommend visiting Mexico City, the response would be both firm and passionate: "Yes, of course." Because this is the best city on the planet, in spite of itself. — Paco Ignacio Taibo II

I've lived in other cities - Rome, Dublin, Mexico City - but I was born in New York City, and I always lived in those other places as a New Yorker. — Pete Hamill

As for us, we were scarcely four hundred strong, and we well remembered the word and warning ... we had received to beware of entering the city of Mexico, since they would kill us as soon as they had us inside. — Bernal Diaz Del Castillo

As a city, it is always compelling. But every day in Mexico City, I give thanks that I am alive. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

And then we would leave, and by that time it would already be dark, and as we headed to the bus or the subway or went walking home, we would eat our sandwiches, enjoying the Mexico City night, which I've always thought is gorgeous, the nights here are mostly cool and bright but not cold, nights made for walking or fucking, nights made for talking. — Roberto Bolano

From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask. The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south again as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long. — William Faulkner

The Aztecs believe they started up in what's now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That's a weird legend. — Jerry Pournelle

Taking it as a whole, Mexico is a grand city, and, as Cortes truly said, its situation is marvellous. — Edward Burnett Tylor

I was born in Mexico because my father was teaching at a school in Mexico City. I was born during the third year he was there. And when I was 16, I returned to Mexico to learn Spanish. — Lupita Nyong'o

Thousands of Mexicans gathered in Mexico City to protest high food prices. The protest only lasted an hour, because everyone had to leave for their jobs in Los Angeles — Conan O'Brien

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. — Lester R. Brown

I have been exploring [Mexico City's] La Merced, [a public market famous for prostitution,] on and off for the last 23 years. The prostitutes and their world have been the main subjects of my photographs. — Maya Goded

I've always thought Mexico City was incredibly dynamic. — Greg Kinnear

I attended elementary school and high school in Mexico City. I was already fascinated by science before entering high school; I still remember my excitement when I first glanced at paramecia and amoebae through a rather primitive toy microscope. — Mario J. Molina

I feel absolutely no threat or fear in Mexico City. — Michael Nyman

I was born in Mexico, I am from Mexico City. — Paulina Rubio

Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)? I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. — Lawrence Summers

From time to time I feel as though my books and figurines were with me still. But how could they be? Are they somehow floating around me or over my head? Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving. — Roberto Bolano

I was taken out of school by my dad when I was 11 and lived in Mexico City, then later in Paris. I went with him to excavate in Bolivia and Peru. I never finished high school. I was a straight F student anyway. My father admitted to me later that he'd thought I would come to no good. — Michael Heizer

more than half of all houses in Mexico City are located in unhealthy, unsafe areas. — Kurt Hollander

What Mexico City cannot do and my country cannot do is to allow us to be intimidated, the authorities to be intimidated, by organized crime. — Enrique Pena Nieto

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology. — Mary Doria Russell

My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement. — Juan Felipe Herrera

A tour of the Mexico City of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo led by Barbara Kingsolver would be nice. And I certainly wouldn't turn down a tour of Johannes Vermeer's Delft led by Tracey Chevalier. — Cathy Marie Buchanan

Suicide by carbon monoxide used to be done in the garage. Now, all you have to do is go to Mexico City and inhale. — Richard Bayan

I was born in the U.S., my wife was born in Mexico and emigrated here when she was in college, and my daughters were born in New York City. That makes them passport-carrying, natural-born, eligible-to-run-for-president Americans. But they're also Mexicans and they like that just fine. — Jeffrey Kluger

I do have very deep, fond memories of my family in Mexico City, but I also remember feeling funny for not speaking English - I was basically an immigrant. But I picked up the language fast and soon I knew that I wanted to be a writer. — Louis C.K.

Arrau performed complete cycles of the Beethoven Sonatas, first in Mexico City in 1938 and later in Buenos Aires, London, and New York. — Victoria A Von Arx

I'll tell you what makes me feel worthwhile: organizing and solving other people's problems. It makes me feel good to go to Mexico City and figure out theories on how you can reorganize and reduce crime. To me, it's one of the more fulfilling ways to spend a day. — Rudy Giuliani

Oscar Otero Aguilar, 21, of Mexico City, Mexico, accidentally shot himself in the head while posing for a "selfie" with a loaded gun. — Benjamin Burrow

Mexico City is very different now than when I grew up, but I was in the streets all the time - though I was born to a middle-class neighborhood where there weren't a lot of gangs and things. I was always comfortable. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America. — Anne Waldman

Does his family have money?" I asked.
"No, Ulises's family doesn't have money," said Requena. "Actually, the only family he has is his mother, right? Or at least I've never heard of anyone else."
"I know his whole family," said Pancho. "I knew Ulises Lima long before any of you, long before Belano, and his mother is the only family he has. He's broke, that I can promise you."
"Then how could he finance two issues of a magazine?"
"Selling weed," said Pancho. The other two were quiet, but they didn't deny it.
"I can't believe it," I said.
"Well, it's true. The money comes from marijuana."
"Shit."
"He goes and gets it in Acapulco and then he delivers it to his clients in Mexico City."
"Shut up, Pancho," said Barrios.
"Why should I shut up? The kid's a fucking visceral realist, isn't he? So why do I have to shut up? — Roberto Bolano

Have you ever been to Mexico City and haggled with the locals over souvenirs? Well, in Peru, you had to negotiate like that to get the freshest fish at the market. — Nobu Matsuhisa

... my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.) — Carlos Fuentes

The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day. — Alma Guillermoprieto

As he walked along the crowded streets, he almost wished for the old days, and carelessly wondered how many men he had killed here. — Jose Antonio Villareal

I was never afraid of anything because I never hurt anyone. I was always an old drunk.
[Mexico City concert, June 2011] — Chavela Vargas

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. — Smedley Butler

Ceramic trade goods involved interconnected markets from Mexico City to Mesa Verde, Colorado. Shells from the Gulf of California, tropical bird feathers from the Gulf Coast area of Mexico, obsidian from Durango, Mexico, and flint from Texas were all found in the ruins of Casa Grande (Arizona), the commercial center of the northern frontier. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Where have you been?" he asked slowly.

"Um, in the bathroom, mostly," Larry said. Let's just say my plumbing is not working any better than Mexico City's. — Kevin Sylvester

Many Mexican directors are scared to shoot in Mexico City, which is why there are many stories in Mexican cinema about little rural towns, or set a hundred years ago. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu