I will always be a New York girl at heart, but I am really liking the L.A. lifestyle.
I come to Fashion Week events in New York City twice a year.
My musical influence is really from my father. He was a DJ in college. My parents met at New York University. So he listened to, you know, Motown, and he listened to Bob Dylan. He listened to Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, but he also listened to reggae music. And he collected vinyl.
I remember getting to New York and riding the subway in the morning to go to a doctor’s appointment, and getting jealous of commuters that were going to their jobs.
I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.
In New York, the former lack of real competition allowed taxis to extract excessive charges, regardless of the poor service.
When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.
In New York City, the meek don’t inherit the earth. The big mouth does.
The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.
I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth; I came from really humble beginnings – the projects of New York City – and I worked my way to get to where I am.
The beautiful thing about New York is, you have to expose yourself to other people the minute you step outside the door. There is no choice. And I love that.
I really would rather have gone to New York, since all my training had been in theater, but I didn’t have the guts to go there alone. I knew only one person in New York, and that was a man. What I needed was a woman. That’s the way Southern girls thought.
I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City. I think it’s changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection. I don’t know why, except it must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something.
I like how they are. I think they’re great. And their communities are communities. I have a greater sense of community in New York than almost anywhere I’ve ever lived. Really, it’s terrific.
L.A., it’s nice, but I think of sunshine and people on rollerblades eating sushi. New York, I think of nighttime, I think of Times Square and Broadway and nightlife and the city that never sleeps.
I was a single dad in New York City, raising a child and pursuing a career.
An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn’t have normally been interested in it.
I wrote a book of essays about New York called ‘The Colossus of New York,’ but it’s not about – you know, when I’m writing about rush hour or Central Park, it’s not a black Central Park, it’s just Central Park, and it’s not a black rush hour, it’s just rush hour.
Every person on the streets of New York is a type. The city is one big theater where everyone is on display.
Whenever I go to New York or any European country, they say: ‘Nawal, why don’t you get a facelift?’ I tell them, ‘I am proud of my wrinkles. Every wrinkle on my face tells the story of my life. Why should I hide my age?’
You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don’t know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.
As I was coming up on the stage, there was one source that could make or break you, the New York Times. Inevitably there would be one actor singled out for a better review, or worse, than somebody else. The effect of that was cancerous, divisive.
If only I had grown up worshipping Julia Child. I was already grown up – thank you very much – when Julia Child’s book was published. When I moved to New York in 1962, you had to own it.
I actually would love to live in New York. But I need land; I need space. I’d love to move to a place where I could have a lot of land and a goat.
People from all over the world want to be in New York. This rather simple idea took me a long time to learn.
In New York I was always offered the hot, sexy roles. But in L.A. I was offered the plain, dowdy roles. It says a lot about the difference between the coasts.
If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You’re dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.
I love Chicago. It’s such a great town, and it’s got great culture and great history, and it’s not as extreme as LA or New York, and it’s just- it’s hard for me for work, because I don’t live and work in the same place and that’s tough. But I’m- I love it.
I think New York is the greatest sports town there is, and I feel like we’re a part of the buzz.
My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed.
My acting career began on the streets of New York. When I was a cop, I played many impressive roles, from derelict to a doctor, and my life often depended on my performance.
I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.
I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup.
I’ve seen the most remarkable thing. It’s in the New York Public Library. They’ve got the original typescript of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ – all four acts of it.
It’s one thing if you live in London and you’re rooting for Chelsea or you’re in New York and you love the Giants or Jets and no matter who’s on the team you’re into it. It’s different in tennis; you’re sort of your own guy, so you have to reach out and grab a person in a different way.
New York is this cacophony – a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.
My great-great-grandfather Julius founded the Communist Party in New York.
I’m tenacious, I think – I know – and I do also have a quality where if you tell me I can’t do something, if I know I can’t do it I’m the first to raise my hand and say, ‘I can’t do that.’ But there is a big Bronx, New York Jew in me that just says, ‘Really? Really? You think I – yes, I can. I can do it. I can do it.’
In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.
For people who know both New York and the Bay Area, it is a complement to say that Oakland is San Francisco’s Brooklyn. It’s a complement both to Oakland and to Brooklyn. And, if you look at Brooklyn, Brooklyn is hot; Brooklyn is cool.
I think if you look at yesterday’s New York Times poll, particularly when you judge Democrats in Congress versus the Republicans in Congress, people put a little more faith, or even a little more than a little more faith in the Democrats in Congress.
In America, kids would go to college and get out and buy a second-hand car and go across the country and discover America. I never did that; I went from New York to Paris, and New York was my America.
People ask me if I ever feel outside the Hollywood loop, and I never do, because both of us do a lot of theatre, so it’s great for New York and it’s also half-way between Europe and the west coast, so it’s the best of both worlds.
New York lost a classic. Carmine was an old school New Yorker.
On a Friday night in 1983, I was in a taxi in New York riding home from dinner with friends. A drunk driver ran a red light and hit the cab, and I was thrown toward the glass partition. I tried to duck, but my face hit the glass, and the impact fractured my cheekbone, my eye socket, my collarbone and several ribs.
I’m still in love with New York. It’s like a dream: there’s so much to do, so much culture.
Other than friends and family, my favorite things are New York and stand-up. I love doing comedy in New York – I can do way more stand-up here than in Los Angeles.
I really wouldn’t want to live in America. I found New York claustrophobic and dirty. I missed England when I was there, simple things like smells and the British sense of humor.
Without a doubt, at the end of the day, Neom will be floated in the markets. The first zone floated in the public markets. It’s as if you float the city of New York.
I think that taxes have to exist. They should exist at the lowest possible level, and to the extent that we can, we shouldn’t invent more. Maybe that’s my experience being mayor of New York City, where we had so many taxes.
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
