The Trump World Tower was home growing up, and it’s where my office is.
At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles.
Aye aye, I’m not one of these people that hate Christmas. Some people think it’s all fake, but I like that kind of thing. It’s like Las Vegas. I know this isnae really the Eiffel Tower and that isnae really the Statue of Liberty, but it’s just a bit of fun.
There is this place called the Tower of London and I think if I wrote about any Royal figure as recent as the 20th Century I might end up there!
I miss a lot about Paris. After three and a half years, you get a little sick of it, and you just want to be home. But there are little things, sights. Like seeing the Eiffel Tower every day, that’s kind of cool.
Before this distinguished assembly and the world, the bells today proclaim the joyous tidings of the completion of this quietly soaring tower.
My mother was the dearest, sweetest angel. She didn’t talk; she sang. She was a tower of strength.
I’m tall now, but when I was younger, I used to tower above everyone – I still feel conscious of that.
I was in Tower Records in San Francisco a few weeks ago, buying some cassettes, and a couple of people recognized me and ran up with albums, and I just wanted to cover my face and have a seizure or something. I want people to just go away.
When I got out of college in 1991, I had four jobs in four different parts of L.A. There was I Love Juicy, a smoothie bar in Venice, and the Videotheque on Sunset Boulevard, across from the old Tower Records. I was also an intern at the ‘Los Angeles Reader’ in the Miracle Mile and at ‘High Performance’ magazine downtown.
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
There has been a stigma around letting movies be seen on home screens on the same day as theatrical screens. Universal said they were going to do it with ‘Tower Heist,’ but they backed off when challenged by the theater owners. I understand where the theater owners are coming from on big studio movies.
What I want to do is produce really delicious food. I want it to look nice, because when you see food you should want to eat it. You shouldn’t be saying, ‘Oh my goodness, isn’t the chef clever, he can weave the Eiffel Tower out of carrot sticks.’
Every single person who enters Trump Tower, you get to see them go up, go down, they talk to the press.
The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan – a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown – has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type.
Our farm is a 15-minute walk to Pablo Picasso’s last home. Alongside it stands the lovely Notre-Dame-de-Vie Chapel with its 13th-century bell tower, which was visible to Pablo from his atelier.
When I saw Kate Moss’s champagne tower from her wedding, I was like, ‘Okay, check – I want that. I want fireworks.’
I wrote ‘Time of the Dark’ in 1978 and ‘The Silent Tower’ in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that’s the great peril for real-world crossovers.
In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it’s not a novel, is ‘The Looming Tower’ by Lawrence Wright or ‘Perfect Soldiers’ by Terry McDermott.
I make friends easily. I’m a gregarious guy, I’m open, I’m easy to get to know – I don’t lock myself in an ivory tower. So I like people; I enjoy people.
I come from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, and by no means am I the only person who has done well – one of my friends is head of year in a great school in Twickenham. Another is a writer; another is an artist, a musician.
I wanted to cut past the polemics and experience London’s Muslim communities for myself. My first visit was to Tower Hamlets, an East London borough that is about 38% Muslim, among the highest in the U.K. As I walked down Whitechapel Road, the adhan, or call to prayer, echoed through the neighborhood.
I remember doing a shoot for Herb Ritts, hanging off the Eiffel Tower – that wasn’t your usual day at the office. It was terrifying, and in the end, you couldn’t really tell how high I was because the photographer was scared of heights, so he was quite far away from me.
I like the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas more than the actual one.
I always wish the hotels were like they are in movies and TV shows, where if you’re in Paris, right outside your window is the Eiffel Tower. In Egypt, the pyramids are right there. In the movies, every hotel has a monument right outside your window. My hotel rooms overlook the garbage dumpster in the back alley.
I was making a film called The White Tower at the foot of Mont Blanc – the one thing I learned from that experience was that it’s more difficult to go down a mountain than to go up. A lot of people don’t realize that.
Living in a tower, however secure it may feel, is hardly a social attribute.
I’ve been to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s a tower, and it’s leaning. You look at it, but nothing happens, so then you look for someplace to get a sandwich.
As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God’s anger; but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex.
Japan today has become acquainted with the Western civilization of the rule of Might, but retains the characteristics of the Oriental civilization of the rule of Right. Now the question remains whether Japan will be the hawk of the Western civilization of the rule of Might, or the tower of strength of the Orient.
During my teenage years as an Islamist recruiter, I moved to live in self-contained communities in the London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets.
I’m one of those people, in any country I’m in, if somebody could just put me in a car or a bus, I’ll look out the window and say, ‘OK, there’s the Tower of London, there’s Buckingham Palace, there’s Big Ben,’ and if it all takes about five minutes, perfect. I’ve seen all of it and I can go home.
In my life, I wanted to feel tall. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be tall as the Sears Tower. I wanted to be on top of the Sears Tower. I wanted to be as strong as the Sears Tower feels.
Anything that promotes a kernel of science, even though it’s exaggerated and hyped by Hollywood, I think is a step forward. We in the ivory tower ultimately have to realize that in some sense we have to sing for our supper.
Once we played for the Princess of Monaco in Paris. We were the biggest ducks ever, wearing rented tuxedos. We trashed the party, took a bunch of girls and champagne in limos underneath the Eiffel Tower, and set up an acoustic show. It was like a Hilary Duff movie.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: ‘It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.
I am not going to write ‘Fifty Shades of Royal Purple.’ Well I could, but I would be put in a beautifully decorated – that having been my profession before – room in the Tower.
I can walk into Tower Records, go get my box set, take out my Steve Miller credit card, and the clerk will look at me and go, ‘Thanks, next.’
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