I really would rather have gone to New York, since all my training had been in theater, but I didn't have the guts to go there alone. I knew only one person in New York, and that was a man. What I needed was a woman. That's the way Southern girls thought.
I'm opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I'm launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January.
New York is a brutally expensive place to live, and the kind of person who might have the dedication and esoteric taste to make the comics that I would really love is finding it more relaxing to live elsewhere.
The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.
The plan was to go Juilliard, graduate, and then go across the street and play in the New York Philharmonic - that was the plan, anyway.
I used to actually work in a comic book stores in New York.
Most people think I'm from New York or something. I was, like, 70 pounds heavier than what I am, and I didn't get no girls... I was definitely more on the deep fried crab than I was on the baked chicken side.
So that when I came to New York again, it was, I'm not too sure right now, but it was '74 or '75. I went to Miami in '74 and then I came to New York, I think, at the end of '74.
You're surrounded by electronic music in New York. I mean New York is one of the few places in North America where electronic music is the prevalent form.
I find it ironic how New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is so focused on such small issues as drink sizes, while ignoring the massive infrastructure challenges in New York - lousy roads, third-world airports, traffic jams, etc.
The best compliment came from Knopf's Sonny Mehta. We were at lunch in New York with my editor, Gary Fisketjon, it was my first time meeting Sonny, and after ordering our food, he turned to me and said, 'Adam, I read 'Mr. Peanut' in two days; every page surprised me, and that, I can assure you, doesn't happen often.'
When I look back on my life, it seems nearly everything of interest happened in little more than one decade - dramas, tragedies, major events, pleasures, my close friendships with artists and political figures, the lovely places where I lived in England and New York, the trips to Europe, visits at the White House.
I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there're comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.
These endless legal challenges that define elections in New York are a joke in this country, and they are the reason why it is so expensive, or one of the reasons, it's so expensive to run here and why so many people decide not to run.
I had a teacher, he was 86 years old and his name was Luigi in New York City, and he said, 'Never stop moving. You get to reinvent yourself.' So you have to find ways to reinventing yourself. Especially today, because it's a whole different market - social media is so important.
My family moved from Massachusetts to Maryland after my sophomore year of high school, and that's when I got the audition for 'Uncle Buck.' I took the train into New York, and I think I did the test with John Candy. Then I got the part, and it was my first movie and my first screen anything.
When I first went to New York I was right out of high school, I was 17 years old, and I had never seen a building over two stories high.
I love London - its where I'm born and bred - but New York just has such an energy when you're walking around, and if you act or you write and you act like I do, its just such a good town for you because people here like people who can do more than one thing.
I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
Nature is extremely important to me. Which may be just about the only trouble I'll have in New York. I'll miss the trees!
The first time I did stand-up I was 17, and I was really a stand-up once I was 19 in New York, and now I'm 41, and I still feel like I haven't found myself onstage. Earlier in my career, I was really tight, really together, and knew who I was and I was confident.
I think you can tell when a New York show isn't shot in the city. It's so iconic and has such a specific energy.
I started coming up to New York at age 17. There was a girl I met over the summer somewhere; I was chasing her. I would drive up to D.C., where I had made some friends, which was about four hours away, and we would take the bus up to New York.
I learned how to get rid of the Southern accent when I was, like, 11 years old and living in New York for the summer doing modeling and commercials and auditioning for Broadway. The mother I lived with for the summer taught me how to drop my Southern accent.
New York City has no need to move on from 9/11 because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments after.
Those who remember New York in the 1970s, as I do, look back on a city that had hit a very rough patch - decaying, bankrupt, and crime-ridden. But fun.
I certainly went to New York because I was searching. Most people who go to New York are searching.
I love New York. I've always loved New York.
I've always liked New York, as I like towns with an edge and New York has a European feel, so when I came to play music here in the '80s it was a surprise to me.
I don't use any real vintage hardware any longer. That's always been the object as far as gaining control of the studio environment, going back to when I built my first studio, Secret Sound, in New York City. The whole point was to not have to pay studio bills anymore and not be looking at the clock.
I love to sit, to watch people; even in New York, I don't feel as free as in London.
So I majored in Drama, did all the plays that were possible to do, skated through school in order to be in every production on stage or backstage in whatever capacity and I came to New York looking for work in the summers.
New York doesn't care who you are or where you came from.
When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.
People often think of New York as a city, a concrete jungle with soaring skyscrapers and yellow taxis and the bright lights of Times Square. And it is that, in part. But beyond that, it's rolling hills of fruit orchards and fields of grain and ice-cold waters brimming with oysters.
I moved to New York and couldn't get a job as an actor. And waited tables for so long.
