Although I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity, my trips to Ferguson, Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago have revealed that there is an undercurrent of unease.

Dad was an outstanding leader. He'd bring in top thinkers from a wide array of fields - how to fix the Detroit schools, for example. I watched him in these meetings. He listened and probed.

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

I see the people in Detroit are very - they're like a lot of cities, but they're very proud to be from there and they really want to see change and they really want to see good things happen.

My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

I grew up in the city of Detroit, where a lot of people didn't have work opportunities, but they were good, hard-working people, including I had a single mom who took care of me and my brother.

People know Detroit for the cars, but the suburban areas of the city are really beautiful. It's much more inhabitable than people think. Many believe it's like Berlin at the end of World War II.

I love coming to Detroit. First getting to be buddies with Kid Rock in the beginning, and him being really great to us, showing us love, the love of the city. I feel like it's our city now, too.

I think me leaving Detroit shaped my style. Me leaving, going to New York, going to L.A. and seeing what they were doing there. I think that inspired me more than what people were doing back home.

You can't even look outside because everything's so crazy, especially in America. And I live in Detroit! There's the economy, and the fact you can't even open your door any more without going nuts.

Being in southwest Detroit, when my dad would want to say anything about me or my brothers or sisters, he would start speaking in Spanish to my uncle and my grandmother because we didn't understand.

My father worked on assembly lines in Detroit while I was growing up. Every day, I watched him do what he needed to do to support the family. But he told me, 'Life is short. Do what you want to do.'

I remember the different things that were happening to my family as we were getting situated and buying our first home in southwest Detroit, watching my mother learn how to drive for the first time.

I was born in Chicago. I moved to Detroit until I was six and moved to Oakland at that point. And then we had a couple years in Stockton and Pasadena. And by the time I was 13, I was back in Oakland.

After three failed marriages, I know what it's like to be replaced. So that's kind of how Joey Harrington must feel today... A former No. 1 choice looks to me like he's going to be a bust in Detroit.

It's still a trip for me to see somebody that I've only seen on television or in a movie. When they are there in real life, it's very different. When we played Detroit, Kevin Costner played before us.

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

I'd watch my father get up at 5 o'clock and go down to the Eastern Market in Detroit to do the shopping for his restaurant, and get that business going and then go out on his vending machine business.

One of the best things I found out about Detroit is that bears have started returning to the city. When bears are gentrifying your neighborhood and opening Thai restaurants, that's a poor neighborhood.

There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees. And there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living.

One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.

When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air and it came down, it would hit an autoworker because the Chrysler Jefferson plant where my husband worked was very close also to where we lived.

Everybody in Hollywood has to beat the 'no' - and if you write code in Silicon Valley, or if you design cars in Detroit, if you manage hedge funds in Lower Manhattan, you also have to learn to beat the 'no.'

Every time I come to Detroit, I feel the same energy every time. The people are vibing. They're outgoing and loving. They're solid, and a lot of people aren't like that. They're honest and real from the jump.

Detroit has a history of a lot of great rebounders and big guys that have been great defenders. So for me to pick up where they left off and continue that trend, of being a gritty, tough big man is pretty cool.

I think Detroit is already providing a model for change in the world. I think that Detroit - I mean, people come from all over the world come to see what we're doing. People are looking for a new way of living.

Poland in the 1990s saw a surge of unrestrained, American-style capitalism. With millions of Poles living in the U.S.A., the defeat of communism led many to aim for a lifestyle derivative of Chicago or Detroit.

Detroit has always been a rock and roll audience for me and picked up on me and my performances long before a lot of other places in the country. I will never forget that. It's a home away from home. I love it.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, 'I'm an orphan again today, isn't this terrible? Poor me.'

I had sort of exhausted all the avenues playing in Detroit. So again, through the stewardship of my brother, I ended up in California and went to the Musicians Institute in L.A. I wanted to get better as a player.

I love meeting fans. The people who are fans of my books are really smart and dedicated, because some independent comics are hard to get. I will drive all the way to Pittsburgh or Detroit to put it in their hands.

People across metro Detroit face discrimination every day in housing, employment, insurance - the list goes on. It might not always be explicit and in your face, but my residents know when they're being mistreated.

I had pro offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, who were pretty hard up for linemen in those days. If I had gone into professional football the name Jerry Ford might have been a household word today.

'8 Mile' could do without an unnecessary class swipe. In a final throwdown, Rabbit clowns a competitor by revealing that the guy went to suburban Detroit Cranbrook, one of the finest private schools in the country.

The Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons are there today as sure as they were when what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Would you rather have a basketball team, or would you rather be Detroit?

In Detroit, in a city that in many cases the world has rejected, that's where God shows up. Every example in the Gospels where God shows up, it's always when the seas are the stormiest, where there is discontinuity.

I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. For part of my life, I was living in Detroit, and I remember a friend of mine commenting she could always tell when I had been speaking to my mother because my New York accent had come back.

Detroit is drunken idiots. It was no surprise to me. I performed with Kenny Rogers for one year as his opening act, and I got to visit every major American city and notice the audience, and Detroit was one of the worst.

The first film I made was when I was 13 and it was called 'The Dogs That Ate Detroit.' It starred my Saint Bernard Barney, and it was a killer thriller with oodles of special effects that were cutting edge for the time.

While I was at community college, I studied industrial design because I thought maybe I'd be an automotive designer - I grew up in Detroit - and I also studied, geology because I was interested in science, a little bit.

Growing up as a kid in Detroit, way back, there was a movie station that would show old kinescope reproductions of old movies, and I remember seeing Bela Lugosi for the first time and being duly frightened out of my wits.

You can find old Jewish newspapers from Detroit that have my promotional ad in them. It was a totally insane time in my life. Paul Rudd was also a bar mitzvah emcee, you know? It was like being a local rock star in Detroit.

I was raised on gospel. I remember hip-hop and rock music were secular, so basically, for my first ten years living in Detroit, I was on gospel. But when I moved to Houston, that's when I got to open up my musical horizons.

Tesla has humiliated established carmakers with its brilliant vision. But Detroit, Turin, Stuttgart, and so on have understood scale as well as capital allocation for decades. Such gargantuan tasks could yet humiliate Tesla.

I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.

It's really the city of Detroit that I owe the thanks to and all the people along the way, so many people that played a role in my success in giving me the dreams and aspirations to go to college and do the things that I did.

I grew up not far from where Motown was founded, maybe 300 miles from Detroit and I've always liked - I used to like the way they made records. I still do, I just haven't had a chance to hear as much. They used to entertain me.

A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.

In 2011, I started a nonprofit organization, Venture for America, to help bring talented young entrepreneurs to create thousands of jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, Baltimore and other cities around the country.

I've performed in Auburn Hills, at The Palace, so I haven't really been in downtown Detroit, but I've been able to be here, and I can really see, what the city was. Like, I can feel why Motown started here and how amazing it was.

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