I was in a Broadway musical called Big Time Buck Wright.The play didn't make it but I was a success. It lasted six days but I sung four songs and there were critics, seriously, in New York who said that my part was perfect. So I can beat Joe Frazier singing.
I spent a lot of time standing on street corners [of New York City] talking to local residents. I spent time in bookstores and galleries. But most of the time, I really did not have much to do.
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them - this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air.
I don't like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend . . . asked me to go to the top of the Empire State Building once, and I told him that he shouldn't treat New York as a sight-it's feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place else.
A very awkward situation occurs often in New York City when you are walking down a relatively empty sidewalk and there happens to be a person walking right next to you in the same direction as you at the exact same pace as you. I never know whether to pass or draft. It becomes sort of a strange competition.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
Growing up in New York, I was sort of shocked when I realized that my children are Californians. They are 14 years old, and I explain to them frequently that they will never realize the glory of a snow day. You wake up and the world says, 'Oops, it's too much fun to go to school, you've got to stay home and deal with the snow!'
My grandfather lived to be 96 years old. He was born in a town outside of Salerno in Southern Italy. He came to New York when he was 20. He lived in the States from age 20 to 96, but he brought his culture with him, he brought his food with him, he brought his language with him, he never spoke a word of English.
When every piece of furniture and your underwear are taken by the bank, when you lose your house in Florida, in New York, in Amsterdam and L.A., when your wife is dying and your son abandons you, you don't feel very good.
It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.
In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.