One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the stre...
You know, I never knew if I had any talent when I started in this business. My first job was being a page at The Tonight Show. I saw Jack Paar come out one night and sit on the edge of his desk and talk about what he'd done the night before. I though...
I have a novel that I can write. It's about three soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all three, and ...
'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing ...
Sometimes I feel people can move past what they've grown up around and their surroundings while in a place and some people need closure after they've left and then coming back. I've seen it happen with people I knew growing up that hated each other, ...
My parents were kind of over protective people. Me and my sister had to play in the backyard all the time. They bought us bikes for Christmas but wouldn't let us ride in the street, we had to ride in the backyard. Another Christmas, my dad got me a b...
I really love 'Real Housewives.' It's like the, you know, comedy stuff that's, like, intentionally funny. Like, I love 'Nathan for You,' that Comedy Central show. It's just brilliant. My friend Bill Eichner has a show called 'Billy on the Street' tha...
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of 'The Brady Bunch.' Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Ma...
I'm way bigger than people think I am. I'm way bigger. I've been underrated all my life, and that's fine. I have privacy. I can walk the street without being hassled. I can be a regular guy. The price to give that up is so horrible. When you become a...
You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization...
I'm greedy about cities - I like to form my impressions of them on my own, and on foot as far as possible, looking and listening, having conversations with bridges and streets and riverbanks, conversations I tend not to be aware of until a little lat...
My first architectural project I did, I must have been fifteen, was for neighbors across the street, a couple of school teachers, and I designed a house for them. I didn't know anything about Le Corbusier or anything like that, but it ended up being ...
In Britain, there's kids who grew up in London and then kids who didn't. You become quite street wise. It's such a big city, and everyone is moving and trying to get on with their lives. You don't have the everyday village quality like, 'Hello, how a...
If you're walking with your lady on the sidewalk, I still like to see a man walking street-side, to protect the lady from traffic. I grew up with that, and I hate to see something like that get lost. I still like to see that a man opens the door. I l...
I was Jewish, through and through, although in our house that didn't mean a whole lot. We never went to synagogue. I never had a Bar Mitzvah. We didn't keep kosher or observe the Sabbath. In fact, I'm not so sure I would have known what the Sabbath l...
She was around ten minutes late, as a matter of fact. I didn't give a damn, though. All that crap they have in cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post and all, showing guys on street corners looking sore as hell because their dates are late - that's bu...
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pr...
We see parts of each other, and we put them together. But if I want to see you in totality, you need to move away; we need space between us. Across the street ,I can see all of you at once, but then I also see this huge vista of space surrounding you...
I was awkward-looking with huge brown eyes, dark brown, pencil-straight hair styled into an old-school Romanian bowl haircut from the 1980s. And I was very, very small. I was always the tiniest kid on my street and in my classes at school... The gym ...
As a kid, I was scared of losing my mind. In Terrell, Texas, where I grew up, there was a guy that would walk down the street talking to himself. And I used to watch him and feel uneasy. And there was a sanitarium where people would say, 'That's wher...
I have decided now that my mother should be the GPS woman, don't you think? That would be fantastic: 'Make a left in 11 miles. Get over now - I want you to be prepared. Turn right on Elm Street, I want to see if Myrna Rosenblatt is still alive. Make ...
