Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.
I was coming to be an adult, the AIDS epidemic happened. Moving to New York, watching that unfold, and watching the activism around that... it was complete chaos of life, and then this horrific non-response from the powers that be. There was a lot of misery and sadness tied up in that.
I'm writing songs about New York. A lot of them carry the names of neighborhoods in Long Island. Maspeth, Montauk. I'm getting into the idea of a F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque Long Island back when New York was...New York.
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.
I stopped taking drugs when I was 19, and who wants to drive a cab around New York with drugs in their car?
I don't care if New York avoided bankruptcy by substituting tourism for the garment business.
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.
Without these tourists, New York would be fantastic. I don't want them to come. Stay home!
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."
If there were, say, only 10 percent of the hotels that exist now, there would be all these apartments for people who live in New York, as opposed to people visiting New York. And then all this junk in the theater, we would no longer need the kind of stuff that tourists like.
New York's not exactly antiseptic. It could be clean and less dangerous, and not horrible, not under a tidal wave of tourists.
I am a New Yorker. I like New York. And I like cities. And it's not my desire to make New York more suburban. I would personally just like to vet each person.
I'd like to decide who comes here. I'd like to be the admissions director of New York.
The great thing about New Jersey is that it's close to New York.
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.
Suddenly the land is haunted by all these dead Indians. There is this new fascination with the Southwest, with places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, where people come down from New York and Boston and dress up as Indians. When I go to Santa Fe, I find real Indians living there, but they are not involved in the earth worship that the American environmentalists are so taken by. Many of these Indians are interested, rather, in becoming Evangelical Christians.
You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.
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.
Boston fans - and New York fans are the same - it doesn't matter what you do outside of baseball, they don't forgive or forget that you play in pinstripes and they don't care about your interests off the field.
Living in New York, I get inspired by what young women are wearing - everything from high fashion to street fashion.
A lot of people realize "I don't have to work in this job that I'm miserable at every year, or every day, and I don't have to live in, for example, New York City where it's super expensive and if I live somewhere else that is less expensive and could pursue my passion like, I can afford to do that."
The New York Times had not become The New York Times overnight. It had to earn its reputation day-by-day.
I must confess that when I'm alone in my study, here in New York, writing; that's when I'm happy.
There seems to be less obvious corruption in city government and New York politicians, they aren't Republican or Democrat, they're New Yorkers.
I had grown up and gone to high school in New York, so I wanted to get out of the east coast.
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