I used to think being in the West would be incredible and then when I was nine my parents moved us to Belfast. I was initially amazed by little things - in toyshops you could actually play with the toys, the schools were more colourful and there were so many magazines everywhere.

Katie Melua

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.

Adrian McKinty

On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located.

Adrian McKinty

Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world.

Clive Owen

My mom's half-Irish, and my dad's half-Irish. We don't know much about my mom's side, but my dad's mom came from Belfast and married my grandfather, who was from Wales.

Coco Rocha

I started to watch 'Play for Today' and plays like 'Cathy Come Home,' and Kenneth Branagh's 'Billy' trilogy in the 1980s, which took us into the world of the Belfast family. As a kid in Luton, how was I ever going to know that world otherwise?

Colin Salmon

My father was from Belfast; my mother was from Crossmolina. I grew up in Dublin.

Colm Wilkinson

We do have pictures on the wall, in our office in Belfast where we spend half our time. All the head shots are on the wall. So yeah, we just throw darts at the ones we don't want anymore.

D. B. Weiss

Jason Momoa became a really good friend of ours when he played Khal Drogo. We loved hanging out with Momoa, and suddenly we couldn't bring him to Belfast anymore.

D. B. Weiss

When I play discos in Belfast or freshers' week in Oxford, there are 1,800 kids dressed as me. It's odd, it's funny, and it pays really well.

David Hasselhoff

Northern Ireland has a unique place in the Union. As the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement enshrined in law, the people of Northern Ireland can be British, Irish or neither.

David Lidington

The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement was a bilateral one between ourselves and Ireland and did not involve the E.U. at all. It just presupposed common E.U. membership as a facilitator of its successful operation.

Dominic Grieve

If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia - two communities bleeding each other to death for generations.

Ehud Barak

The thirties were troublesome in Belfast, and then of course there was no work for people, and it was terribly religiously divided.

Frank Carson

He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back... I went to his funeral in Belfast.

Frank McCourt

I really love it in Belfast. I always stay in the most bombed hotel, the Europa!

Gareth Gates

The countryside in Belfast is beautiful. No technical wizardry is needed to show quite how glorious it is in its natural state.

Gwendoline Christie

When I retired from the circus at the grand old age of 11, my parents thought it would be best to focus more on the challenges ahead, and so I started at Methodist College Belfast.

Ian Beattie

I might bump into them because I live in Belfast, and Belfast is not that big a place. You go for a walk, and you walk past Kit Harington. You go for a meal, and there's Peter Dinklage.

Ian Beattie

My dad moved to London in his early 20s and didn't really go back. So the irony is I've spent lots and lots of time in Ireland, but not with my dad. I've shot films in Belfast, where he's from. And I've shot in Dun Laoghaire. Which is great. And I've shot in Dublin.

Imogen Poots

Belfast is a city which, while not forgetting its past, is living comfortably with its present and looking forward to its future.

James Nesbitt