New York Culture Quotes

David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love about New York, especially the stunning diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and communities.

I've never left for New York. I've stood my ground here my whole career and hopefully will be able to until the day that I die.

New Yorkers only cross water for visual culture if the water is an ocean. The East River throws us for a huge loop. If we started going to Queens and the Bronx for visual culture, many of our rent, space, and crowding problems would be over indefinitely.

I really got the 'Rhoda' flavor from studying my stepmother, Angela, who's Italian, not Jewish. There's really so little difference between the speech patterns and family attitudes of Jews and Italians in the New York area, anyway.

I like L.A., but I'm definitely a Brooklyn girl; I'm a city girl. I need the cars honking. I need the bright lights. I need people yelling in the middle of the night screaming at each other. I need all of that.

To me, a New Yorker is someone that has general disdain toward landlords, mass-transit authorities, electric companies, sports-team managers, NYU and its students, and anything new.

New Yorkers are obsessed with youth and eternal youth and then their careers and making money.

People in France are very intrusive when they recognize you. In New York, they are very polite, with quick words, so it's great.

I don't, really a fashionable person. I'm an actor, so I like costumes. But fashion is very popular now. Really overly popular. It's like New Age music in the '80s, or art. And then independent film. Now everyone's a fashion designer. It's had a big effect in New York, in our culture.

My story is so boring: Long Island Jewish parents take their daughters to Broadway.

That's the New York thing, isn't it. People who seem absolutely crazy going around telling you how crazy they used to be before they had therapy.

[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.

Ms. Sciorra is a member of a dwindling fleet of actors who actually sound like they come from somewhere. In her case, 'somewhere' is Brooklyn. In most movies, and perhaps especially in a handful of singeing 'Sopranos' episodes, 'somewhere' makes her vital. She's what you'd call an around-the-way girl.

I'm a neurotic New York Jew by birth. Creating characters is second nature to me.

Broadway is a main artery of New York life - the hardened artery.

I'm a New York girl. I want to stay here and raise my son here.

It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.

I go to California and to New York, and it's not like the people are really mean.

In New York, appearance is a form of currency or, at the very least, a calling card. One must look wealthy in order to be recognised as a person of worth.

Brooklyn has a strong, historic relationship with both music and basketball, and I look forward to working with BSE Global to find new ways to deepen and celebrate that relationship within our community.

In New York, as long as you're not peeing in someone's doorway, everyone thinks you're a gentleman. I feel like my behavior goes over better on the streets of New York.

Being from New York, everybody's a point guard. Even when you play in the park, you've got to know how to handle the ball. If you can't handle the ball, you can't really play.

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

I wasn't making any money, but I didn't feel unsuccessful because of that. You can do that in New York but not in Hollywood. In Hollywood, it is how much money you make.