Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in a very Jewish neighbourhood and thought the whole world was like that. My parents were secular, but I went to a very Orthodox Jewish school, and I really got into it. I found it all fascinating, and I was just kind of really attracted to the metaphysical questions.
With 'Pariah,' at the time, I had just come out. I had a coming out experience, and I was writing about it, transposing my experience as an adult: What would it have been like if I had been a teenager in Brooklyn? The funny thing was people thought I was from Brooklyn. I had to be like, 'No, I'm from Nashville.'
It was great growing up in Brooklyn. The neighborhood was the street. Everybody would get together after school. Somebody would sit out on a stoop and then five other people, 10 other people would come out - a game of stickball or stoopball or dodgeball - all revolved around a basketball or dodgeball. We had fun.
I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.
I don't think people realize how much I love basketball. A lot of people think because of this idiotic comment I made that I love baseball and don't like basketball. Baseball came first because if you grew up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, that was the No. 1 thing. But if you have more than one kid, you love them both.
My mother was not a country girl. She was a Brooklyn girl, born and raised in Flatbush, and then a Long Island girl, who liked shopping, 'a little glitter' in her clothes, and keeping secret the actual color of her hair, which from the day I was born to the day she died, was the 'platinum blonde' of Jean Harlow's.
I have a very unsatisfactory and incomplete knowledge of Brooklyn and cannot discuss specifically either what you can do here or what possibilities the city shows in an artistic way. I am not a foreigner but coming here as I do after a long stay abroad, I think things here strike me much as they strike a foreigner.
I grew up in a little bubble of Brooklyn in France! In Stains, I was learning to speak English; I was listening to Biggie Smalls and KRS-One, and so I basically lived the life by proxy. At the same time, I had the same problems and issues they were singing about right next to me, so it was easy to identify with it.
A Texas upbringing - and living now in Brooklyn, too - have surely helped my appreciation for open spaces and skies, but beyond that, it's not easy to find words for what it feels like to be up in the Rockies or out on the Great Basin - such silences and spaces! - or to be heading up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a major neighborhood specializing in that, in Brooklyn. And somewhere when I was about 14, something changed. And that change probably involved updating every molecule in my body, in that I sort of realized: this is nonsense, there's no God, there's no free will, there is no purpose.
I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French.
When I was a kid, there was nothing better than water balloon fights. I grew up in Brooklyn: we had the fire hydrants, and we would open up a soda can at both ends and squirt people walking by. I love the kinds of things that encourage you to let your guard down, be open and vulnerable, and just to be laughing sincerely.
How did females become 'guys?' How did everyone become 'guys?' Remember, too, that a male guy was something of a scoundrel. And a wise guy was a fresh kid, a whippersnapper. In its most other famous evocation, men in Brooklyn said 'youse guys.' Damon Runyon referred to hustlers, gamblers, and other nefarious types as guys.
Even if I don't see Brooklyn I have to see Anomolisa, because it's Charlie Kaufman. No one is doing things that they should't be doing more in cinema than Charlie Kaufman. This is how I look at it: he had an incredible story that was going to resonate regardless, but just shooting that movie is too easy for Charlie Kaufman.
I could have easily been a statistic. Growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., it was easy - a little too easy - to get into trouble. Surrounded by poor schools, lack of resources, high unemployment rates, poverty, gangs and more, I watched as many of my peers fell victim to a vicious cycle of diminished opportunities and imprisonment.
I've taught people in improv classes, then watched them move to Los Angeles to become Emmy winners and movie stars. That experience, for anyone wondering, is both super exciting and also makes you put a microscope on your own life choices. It causes you to question why you still perform stand-up in so many Brooklyn basements.
My grandmother, Nina Eaton, founded United Cerebral Palsy. At the time that my father was born with it, there were no resources for people with the condition. So my grandmother and grandfather, who lived in Brooklyn, tried to reach out for some type of resource or support, and people just told them to institutionalize my father.
You want to know what makes me tick, I'll tell you what makes me tick. I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn; I read a two-penny magazine called 'The Hawk's Nest.' Nobody entered that nest that didn't leave a little richer and a little wiser. And that 11-year-old boy said, 'Isn't that a wonderful thing.' And that's all there is to it.
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.
My mother was a full-time mom, and Dad started his own business. He was a mini-American dream story. Came from Russia at age 4, started his own pen business in Brooklyn. The company isn't around now, but he created his own healthy little world, leaving a decent legacy. My dad taught at Cooper Union but was never fully graduated himself.
When I was in New York, I put together a show; I put together this really great band and performed at this place called Littlefield in Brooklyn. It was really fun. I did, like, 10 standards, and then I just hopped around different bars like Mona's and different jazz clubs in New York just singing because I know all the standards so well.
I grew up, as I joke around, in the 'People's Republic of Charlestown' in the city of Boston. And I was blessed to be raised right there on Monument Square in Charlestown, and every morning I'd hop on the bus and go on a 45-minute ride out to the suburbs in Brooklyn for elementary school. And I got to have my seat, really, in both worlds.
I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values.
Every single place that's brushed upon me has made me the artist that I am - from Nigerian Highlife music and the vocal melodies that I grew up on when I would be sitting with my father and his fellow chiefs, to the funk and freeness of the Bay Area groove, to L.A.'s smooth G-funk legacy, Brooklyn's lyricism, and now Atlanta's trap history.
Being in New York as a whole, Brooklyn as well, you can do anything you want. That's by far the best part about New York, besides just the hustle and grit and grind of Brooklyn specifically, but the best food. Anybody you want to get in contact with, odds are if they don't live in New York, they're passing through New York at some point in time.