The first job I got when I was in high school was working for a department store in New York. I worked in the stockroom. That's when I learned that I couldn't work for anyone else, because I was spoken to in a way that I wasn't spoken to at home.
When I was younger, my view of New York was really wide-eyed and excited. I've lived here all my life.
My relationship to New York has changed a lot. I feel lucky to live here. A lot of times you walk through the city and don't notice that you're in a really beautiful neighborhood, or that you're passing a beautiful building. It's nice, as an exercise, to keep aware that you're in a really lucky place.
Writing songs about it is a really useful way for me to love New York more, and stay observing it, and not just zone it out.
You meet a lot of people in New York who are different than you, and have different stories, so I see everyone as super individual.
When you first run up First Avenue in New York, if you don't get goose bumps, theres something wrong with you.
The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.
The New York playgoer is a child of nature, and he has an honest and wholesome regard of whatever is atrocious in art.
What I really have a sense of dismay about is that there is a center of anything. I think maybe Cleveland can use one. Also possibly Los Angeles needs informed cultural guidance and a place to go get it. But not New York. New York is a center, a world's fair, and a den of thieves, and a house of miracles.
I've always been a city person - London boy - and New York is just incredible. It has what London has but almost more in terms of variety, culture, social life, everything. I just like walking the streets and feeling the energy and the vibe.
People had said to me New York is kind of cutthroat and people walk past you on the street. I find it the opposite. I find that people want to talk.
The United Nations is an uplifting experiment, dedicated to raising the standards of living in Africa , the consciences of democracies, and the price of prostitutes in New York
I came to New York when I was 21, 22. I couldn't speak English. I knew I wanted to go to fashion school.
I stopped taking drugs when I was 19, and who wants to drive a cab around New York with drugs in their car?
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."
Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here.
Without these tourists, New York would be fantastic. I don't want them to come. Stay home!
The great thing about New Jersey is that it's close to New York.
New York's not exactly antiseptic. It could be clean and less dangerous, and not horrible, not under a tidal wave of tourists.
In New York we have zillions of different kinds of people, many of them hate each other, but violence based on that hatred is really uncommon here.
New York was always more expensive than any other place in the United States, but you could live in New York - and by New York, I mean Manhattan. Brooklyn was the borough of grandparents. We didn't live well. We lived in these horrible places. But you could live in New York. And you didn't have to think about money every second.
The other day I read that last year 58 million tourists came to New York ... where a puny eight million people are trying to live. Unless they own a hotel chain, I don't think a single one of these eight million people are happy about this.
One [New York] eatery is a remodeled diner that looks like what Busby Berkeley would have done if only he hadn't had the money.
I don't care if New York avoided bankruptcy by substituting tourism for the garment business.
Baseball has always been slow to accept change. Only through dire pressure can any radical change be accomplished. The move of the Giants and Dodgers from New York to California brought that pressure in abundance.
