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A lot of my friends who grew up in Manhattan have a strange phobia about Brooklyn. It's big and scary and they get lost.
Sep 17, 2025
For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.
I hope for the experience of people standing together, turning their backs to the city and facing this, and hearing the leaves rustle. Well, maybe it won't be as bucolic as at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but I know you will feel removed from the city.
I'm a person who has, to a certain extent, redefined where I should be. I started off in Brooklyn and Queens and I wasn't supposed to come to Manhattan.
MAD FREE is simply described as "Liberating Conversations with Revolutionary Women about Beauty, Image and Power". It began as a Salon series in NY loft in Brooklyn as a salve to my broken heart after Honey Magazine folded. It was not because of the readership or because the market wasn't there; the company that held it collapsed, which I was the last editor in chief of.
I'm a tough old broad from Brooklyn. I intend to go on acting until I'm ninety, and they won't need to paste my face with make-up.
Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
I learned a great deal doing Brooklyn Bridge. I was able to take a giant step into the terrible reality that was then. We saw the cattle cars that took folks away. Just knowing it was real, it would be impossible not to feel.
I come from nowhere Brooklyn, New York. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These days Williamsburg is kind of a hip area, but when I grew up there, the taxi drivers wouldn't even go over the bridge, it was so dangerous.
I remember riding across the Brooklyn Bridge about 12 times because they wanted me to keep up with the helicopter, and I said, "Can you have the helicopter keep up with me, my calves are burning!"
You can find your way across this country using burger joint the way a navigatior uses stars....We have munched Bridge burgers in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and Cable burgers hard by the Golden Gate, Dixie burgers in the sunny South and Yankee Doodle burgers in the North....We had a Capitol Burger - guess where. And so help us, in the inner courtyard of the Pentagon, a Penta burger.
I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.
I remember perfectly my first trip to New York, when I was on the bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, when I saw the skyscrapers. It was like an incredible dream.
For me, Twitter works best as a way of taking pictures of being stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. If people really want to read really funny quips about life, parenting, and pop culture, then by all means read Michael Ian Black's tweets.
The Brooklyn Bridge and I grew up together.
George Washington Bridge? You throw yourself off the Brooklyn Bridge, traditionally. George Washington Bridge, who does that?
Everyone should walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I did it three days in a row because it was one of the most exhilarating experiences I've ever had. The view is breathtaking.
Carl Furillo was pure ballplayer. In his prime he stood six feet tall and weighed 190 pounds and there was a fluidity to his frame you seldom see, among such sinews. His black hair was thick, and tightly curled. His face was strong and smooth. He had the look of a young indomitable centurion ... I cannot imagine Carl Furillo in his prime as anything other than a ballplayer. Right field in Brooklyn was his destiny.
That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.
I work in comedy, journalism, media, and technology, many of which don't have a lot of black faces in visible positions. I walk through Brooklyn with a surfboard. It's fun to challenge and expand people's expectations.
I love living in Brooklyn. Originally I moved there because I could enjoy a bigger space for less money than I would ever get in Manhattan.
Brooklyn for twenty years, Ive learned that there is always someone better than you at what you do.
Normally my sister, Sadie, or some of our other initiates from Brooklyn House would've come with me. But they were all at the First Nome, in Egypt, for a weeklong training session on controlling cheese demons(yes, they're a real thing; believe me, you don't want to know)
Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
Farrell's Bar in Brooklyn had urinals so large they looked like shower stalls for Toulouse-Lautrec.
My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.
I seen her in the subway, on my way to Brooklyn. "Hello, good lookin, is this seat tooken?" On the A Train, pickin at her brain, I couldn't get her number, I couldn't get her name. I said, "I still like your style and fashion, But I hate your hot sadiddy attitude wit a passion. Is it because brothers like to hawk a lot? Is it because your sign don't talk a lot?" She turned away, no play, I said, "OK, You don't really look good, I hope you have a bad day."
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
I was a prosecutor in Brooklyn in the homicide division and then as a senior assistant district attorney.
Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn.
It was always a funny thing when someone would ask me my name and I would say "Brooklyn." They would always think that I meant that I lived in Brooklyn, and I would have to clarify that.
There hadn't been one done since the late 70s. I was living in Brooklyn, had no connection to Roger Corman, to no one in this movie. I didn't go to film school. I'm like the person who should have never made this film. But I just decided to put one foot in front of the other. I was writing film articles for magazines at the time. I convinced an editor from one of the magazines that I was working for to give me a shot to do a piece on Roger. This was an excuse to go meet him.
I have an apartment in Brooklyn - I guess I call it my shrine. I go there to create and recoup, or hibernate sometimes, but my home is in Dallas where I live with my children.
It's just that little box in the middle of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Most of the time I go I don't even leave that apartment. I have just enough: a little bed, a little kitchen with two pots. I make some tea and I look out the window or just lay down.
I'm a tough old broad from Brooklyn. Don't try to make me into something I'm not. If you want someone to tiptoe down the Barkley staircase in crinoline and politely ask where the cattle went, get another girl.
If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.
For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge. So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it - something that was very aggressive and dangerous - and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence.
You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.
My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. Izzy, she would say, did you ask a good question today? That difference - asking good questions - made me become a scientist.
I lived in Brooklyn for a year and I moved out to Rockaway Beach. I've been living here for two years now. I put my address on the album, so I have a lot of visitors all the time.
When I was just a kid, growing up in Brooklyn, I was constantly making home videos with my family – real silly high-concept productions like, 'Attack of the Killer Handkerchief.' I guess I knew even then that I wanted to be an actress.
I definitely like to stay active. Im a huge fan of the NBA and the sport of basketball. I love to play pick-up games in Brooklyn where I live.
I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.
It meant that she belonged some place. She was a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. She didn't want to change into a bit of this and a bit of that.
I started in theater when I was 14 in the Henry Street Playhouse on the Lower East Side in New York. You hustle, you beat the sidewalk, the pavement - audition, audition. I just started working around town everywhere. I mean everywhere - the Village, Harlem, you know. Brooklyn Academy Of Music. Just job after job.
In adolescence I started to find out about Robert Wilson because I saw Lou Reed's "Timerocker" at [the Brooklyn Academy of Music]. I started getting into Jim Jarmusch and knew that my uncle was a friend of his. I pieced together parts of his life in high school and college, which lead me to his story in a funny way.
I was chomping at the bit to get my career started - so after I took all the theater courses at Brooklyn College I enrolled in a two year program at AMDA in the city (The American Musical Dramatic Academy) I was there for 6 months and loved it.
There was a bridge to the 21st century, and yet, somehow, for very large number of Americans, it was unclear how you got from one place to the other, from being a manual working-class man to being some part of a Brooklyn-based sharing economy.
My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called 'bread lines,' children begging in the streets.