Does the assignment operator consume memory in Java?

I have some two Strings as below:

"yes", "no".

Now, I would like to compare these Strings in two ways:

1. Directly:
   Example: "yes".equals("no")

2. By assigning the strings to some variable: Example:

   String string1 = "yes";
   String string2 ="no";
   string1.equals(string2);
   

In these two cases, is there any memory or performance difference?