New York Quotes

When I put my big retrospective together in '96 [for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York], I saw that there were all these pictures of people inside looking out. All these pictures of women in water and mirrors. I don't know what it means.

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

The thing about New York is you can leave your house without a plan and find the day. You can't do that in Los Angeles. You need to get in your car, all this, you can't just drive around like a lunatic. In New York, you can literally walk outside, and wind up anywhere.

Virtually everyone with a high-paying job in Washington, New York and Los Angeles demanded that voters not support Donald Trump for president but they did it anyway but we never saw it coming. Why is that?

Everybody in the media thinks the New York Times is the bible. So whatever is in it is safe to run and is gospel, and is unchallengeable. It's infallible.

I think it was simply word of mouth that made it a New York Timesbestseller for more than 60 weeks, over a year. People being moved and changed and transformed by the book [One Thousand Gifts] and wanting to share that with hurting people all around them.

I guess home is where the heart is, as they say. I've moved around the stage a lot - but I had intended on moving to New York anyway so I could live closer to Ireland and to Europe. That's where my sensibility is. This has just facilitated that process.

Just like New Yorkers themselves, the trees in New York [city] work harder than any others in the world.

New York is the only real city-city.

We take it into account from the very beginning and try to steer couples toward items that lend themselves to those circumstances. Sometimes we have to steer a little more forcefully - you can't fry French fries in the New York Public Library.

I have three boys. And I wanted to make sure it connected with them and then those guys who grew up like me, in environments like me.And then I knew something about science that your New York Times reader would be interested in. So I was thinking about it in multiple ways: I'll connect with the people who grew up like me first, and then the New York Times reader will be interested in the science because it's so good and they want to be "in the know."

New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.

I was thinking about New Mexico, and I rounded the corner in New York, and there was a New Mexico license plate: "New Mexico, land of enchantment."

Now Carlos Slim, as you know, comes from Mexico. He's given many millions of dollars to the Clintons and their initiatives.

There is also this great sense of triumphalism, that just as we defeated the Soviet Union, we can do this. And out of this sense of desperation and pathological religion, there develops an all-encompassing drive to harm and hurt, without regard for the innocent and the uninvolved, which was the case in New York.

I grew up always wanting to be a dancer and when I went to New York, I fell in love with the idea of performing in all ways.

I don't have many actors in my family, but I do have a Great Uncle that is a film-maker in Philadelphia, and my great-great-grandparents were Flamenco dancers in the 30's in New York, they were Spanish dancers.

I feel like fashion was much more exclusive. There weren't as many parties. There weren't as many social gatherings. It wasn't required that designers have events to lure customers or editors or any of that - it was about a show. If there was a dinner or a party, people would go out after. New York nightlife was about late nights and dancing.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

It was ironic that there I was finally painting the pictures I'd always wanted to paint and feeling very much at home in the countryside, and I ended up working in New York City, which is definitely the archetypal city.

Lo! body and soul!--this land! Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and The sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships; The varied and ample land,--the South And the North in the light--Ohio's shores, and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies, covered with grass and corn.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

You can have a lot of New York and still see what's going on in the rest of the world, I think - like in China.

While certain coastal cities have become very prosperous, the rest of China has a per capita income of $200 a year. The coast wants to have nothing to do with the interior; it wants to work with Tokyo and New York. This is an old story in China. It is why Mao succeeded in 1927. He wanted [coastal] Shanghai to throw the foreigners out, but Shanghai was doing too well financially [to expel foreigners]. So Mao went to the interior and raised a peasant army. He came back to Shanghai and sealed off the country.

Patti [ Scialfa] was an artist and a musician and she was a songwriter. And she was a lot like me in that she was transient also. She worked busking on the streets in New York. She waitressed. She had - she just lived a life - she lived a musician's life. She lived an artist's life. So we were both people who were very uncomfortable in a domestic setting, getting together and trying to build one and seeing if our particularly strange jigsaw puzzle pieces were going to fit together in a way that was going to create something different for the two of us. And it did.

My first interview at SI, I sat in silence next to Guy LaFleur for five minutes on the New York Rangers team bus until he finally broke the ice. Those early interviews, every one of them was like a terrible first date.

I am proud to be in Los Angeles. I have a lot of fans that love me here. When you talk about the Meccas of boxing - Las Vegas, New York - now you have to talk about Los Angeles.

I have a double policy, which would also solve immigration: I would stand at the border of New York City and I would say, "You can come here to live, but you can't come here to visit."

It's funny, I write lyrics in a bizarre way - I'm always writing lyrics, mostly when we're traveling or walking around New York, that's when I'm writing most of the stuff.

I feel like I can be infinitely inspired because New York is huge. There's always a new street I can go to, or a billion new people who I haven't met that I could write about. New York is very humbling.

If you're looking for a New York Times best-seller, I may or may not give you that.

Too many people write books because they want to be a New York Times best-seller. They want the glory and the fame.

I had already been a young singer. And once, as a profession, I was a young singer, what you would call a soprano in England, but I was an alto in singing Jewish music in bar mitzvahs and weddings and synagogues throughout New York City because, after Israel, New York is probably the biggest Jewish community in the world.

[Buckminster] Fuller's idea of progress is a very 1950s organization man out of the military sort of idea of progress. So as a result, you have something like: we've got bad weather in New York City; let's put a dome over it. And so I don't want to put a dome over Manhattan and I hope that nobody who ends up reading the book wants to do so as a result.

After each performance of an Austin Shakespeare production, audiences are invited to stay for a ten-minute discussion of the work. And this tradition continues in our New York run.

My association with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is sort of predated by an effort that we were a part of here in New York City regarding the reaction to this 1954 Supreme Court [Brown v Board of Education] decision.

There are still many writers out in the Bay, extraordinary writers like Gina Valdez, a poet who I just saw in Portland. We have young people like Eduardo Corral, who won the Yale Younger Poets Award. José Antonio Rodriguez, published by Luis Rodriguez. But there are only a few of us who are paid attention to in New York. There are legions behind us who are not.

I also have an amazing codesigner and an amazing partnership with New York & Co. The exciting part of growing together and having this kind of long-term relationship is that they can anticipate where I'm going with something. So our relationship is very defined, it's a true partnership so I'm not doing it all by myself.

The idea for Anthem the play began over twenty years ago. I was assisting in the production of another Ayn Rand work, Ideal. I moved to New York and began working on producing the play with my partners. And as a way to raise money to cover some venture debt, we decided to stage Anthem for a limited run at the Lex Theatre in Hollywood.

If Anthem finds an audience in New York City, my hope would be to see the play transferred to a commercial theatre for an open-ended run.

Each day, I read the New York Times before leaving for the theater. And I have this standing assignment: connect the world of Anthem to the late breaking events of the day.

Some of us seem to be born with a drive to try to make the world kinder. In my twenties, living in New York City, I worked in a soup kitchen every Sunday for many years, just trying to do my part. Then I read Animal Liberation and learned about factory farming and the killing of animals for oven cleaner and realized nobody needed my help as badly as the animals did.

I met Peter Brook, the theater director, who's been based in Paris for many years at the Bouffes du Nord. I admire him tremendously. Some years ago, he was in New York, and he gave an interview with The Times, and what he said was this: "In my work, I try to capture the closeness of the everyday and the distance of myth. Because, without the closeness, you can't be moved, and without the distance, you can't be amazed." Isn't that extraordinary?

I was in Taiwan recently and was completely amazed by the density of population. It makes New York look like no one is out on the streets.

I remember going into a raggedy studio, still with my work uniform on. At the time, I was driving money trucks for Wells Fargo, so I had my gun and hat, which weighed me down in the heat. It was 97 degrees here in New York, and they had to turn the air conditioner off because it was too loud. So, I say, "Damn, it's hot in here!" That's how we came up with the song, "Damn, It's Hot." It was from our soul. We just got together, sang and made our own lyrics.

People who are capable of such crimes against our nation [like destruction of 33,000 e-mails] are capable of anything. And so now we address the slander and libels that was just last night thrown at me by the [Hillary] Clinton machine and the New York Times and other media outlets, as part of a concerted, coordinated and vicious attack.

America has borders. You have quite strict borders, actually. Even getting a work permit in New York actually is quite a difficult thing to do. I've got to prove I've got an address. I've got to prove I have private health care. And when my work permit runs out, if I haven't left, there'll be a knock at the door, they'll put me in handcuffs and take me to JFK Airport. That's how you guys do it.

In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.

Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.