Quote

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.

In the 1970s in New York, everyone slept till noon. It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes by the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. The city seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation.

I lived in New York for five years; I've lived in Barcelona, Rome, and Paris at different times. When I was 18, I was dying to live in a city.

And I went to New York and died; for 10 years I walked those pavements. I can't think of New York without feeling uncomfortable and feeling like a failure.

I would have liked to be on the streets of Manhattan during 9/11. My working theory is that people are much kinder to each other in times of trauma than we tend to portray in our stories.

When I was growing up, I was really into 'Rent' and I actually slept on the street in New York all night to get to sit in the first few rows for it.

I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

I moved from a mountain with one traffic light to New York City when I was 17, and it was an amazing, eye opening, creative adventure. I would walk through the streets of Manhattan looking up at these huge buildings, amazed that I didn't know a single person in any of them.