I take the subway all the time here in New York. I love people watching and trying to figure out everybody's background, especially teenagers - they're so uninhibited when they display puppy love. I concoct stories in my mind: 'Are you guys like Romeo and Juliet?'
I wrote a piece in the New York Times back in the Nineties saying that racial discrimination ought to be a criminal offense, not just a civil one. I'm all for the criminalization of discrimination.
In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.
For me, Los Angeles, New York, where I don't know my neighbors, where people don't necessarily care if they know their neighbors, I'm missing things that truly fed my soul when I was younger, the exchanges between people, the caring and the shared history with people.
And when I have lived elsewhere, every two weeks I have to fly back to LA. Even New York directors go there to audition. So I have to be there to a degree.
When I used to do tours, I'd be anxious and nervous on the plane returning to New York. I now realize the reaction was because I was coming back unemployed. Actors are constantly being put to the test.
No matter how many times I visit New York City, I am always struck by the same thing - a yellow taxicab.
Most of my friends in New York are single women or gay men.
I like going to New York. I like the galleries and the theatre and the restaurants and bars and music. I think that city is more alive than Los Angeles.
My parents moved back to New York from Florida when I was in the ninth grade.
When I was a struggling actress in New York in my 20s I worked in a burger joint called Diane's Uptown. I actually loved waiting tables. I still keep who I was in my mind and never take anything for granted.
I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
Take a moment to reflect upon the existence of the musical The Book of Mormon. Now imagine the security precautions that would be required to stage a similar production about Islam. The project is unimaginable—not only in Beirut, Baghdad, or Jerusalem, but in New York City.
I don't believe in the so-called Latino explosion when it comes to movies. Jennifer Lopez doesn't have an accent. She grew up in New York speaking English, not Spanish. Her success is very important because she represents a different culture, but it doesn't help me.
People say we're all identical, but Jennifer Lopez is an American. She's from New York. She doesn't have an accent. Some of these Latin people - their Spanish is pathetic. They learned it when they became famous as Latinos.
My activism and sexual revolution in New York was a factor.
During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity.
My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it.
When I was a kid in San Diego, I would read fashion magazines and Interview magazine, and all of that really inspired me to create a persona. So by the time I moved to New York, in the early '80s, I'd learned how to create a persona, and I knew what my persona would be.
No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American people, and lead to angry comparisons.
When people endure a traumatic event, they are either defeated or made stronger. On Sept. 11, I told New Yorkers, "I want you to emerge stronger from this." My words were partially a hope and partially an observation that people in New York City handle big things better than little things. I could not be more proud of the way my city responded.
The most visible symbol in New York is the spirit of a free people.
So that when I came to New York again, it was, I'm not too sure right now, but it was '74 or '75. I went to Miami in '74 and then I came to New York, I think, at the end of '74.
New York walking isn't exercise: it's a continually showing make-your-own movie.
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
