I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.
I think it was the perfect gestation time for this particular piece [ Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song]. One of the songs that I considered talking about was "Manhattan," because it was chronicling the end of a long relationship that was part of the reason why I moved from Los Angeles to New York, which was such a life-changing decision. I don't regret that it's not in there, but that's one that I considered diving into, and I have little piecemeal snippets of writing about that floating around
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.
New York has always been a sense of eclectic kind of freedom and expression on a lot of different levels.
They want families to come to New York and go to the theater, so the theater is all geared toward family entertainment. It's money, you know.
I did stand-up for a good number of years while I was still living in New York, and those people primarily knew me as 'the kid stand-up.'
The bravest thing I've ever done is fly to New York. I'm simply terrified of aeroplanes - I am the woman you see weeping at the airport.
If I could live in New York the rest of my life, I absolutely would, but it's also prohibitively expensive and you have to be working. New York is a lot nicer when you have a job.
I came to New York in 1962 and it began to look like I might he able to make a living in 1972.
I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.
The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine,' Rushdie says. 'Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.
When I talk about the city, I talk about a city that elevates people, which is the strength of New York. We always had the ability to do that. We had the services to do that: good schools, living-wage jobs. We're moving away from that toward a two-tiered system: a small group of very wealthy people and the rest of the city, poor and working poor.
The world's greatest city - New York City - deserves a government that works for all New Yorkers. That starts with a mayor who is independent from party bosses and special interests, who isn't afraid to be honest with the people, and who is focused on the issues New Yorkers care about most.
London has always been open to trade, people, ideas. We have to keep that. I want to compete not just with New York, Paris, Berlin... the ten fastest growing cities in the world are in China. How do we compete with them? We have to attract investment and we have to compete on skills.
Mayor Koch, of New York, was the first public figure to give me support.
Well, I'm from Indiana. So to me when I was a little kid growing up, Cincinnati was the glamorous New York of it all.
I don't take so-called "vacations" often. In fact vacations are more stressful than the lives my wife and I worked hard to set up for ourselves in New York. It seems like being on vacation is like normal living, which is not very satisfying. It means we're figuring out what to make for lunch today, and that seems like such an absurd way to live. The issue of dealing with that doesn't seem to be so prominent back home. It sounds so silly and ridiculous, but it's really the way it is. We love what we do, so I prefer being in the studio; that's really living for me.
The cool part about New York is that you can do that. You can talk to all the people you admire.
Everyone started to have a camera. That's when I started to travel outside of New York and go into nature.
When I moved to New York, I was still in the closet.
I couldn't wait to come to New York to reinvent myself.
The cool thing for me about moving to New York was that I got to create a new family.
I've always said that racing in New York is performing on the big stage.
I couldn't be more excited to return to the ING New York City Marathon.
I turned 30 and everyone told me I would feel different and I didn't. So I thought I'd move to New York.
