My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.
I really like Los Angeles - I had a good life out there. But the reason I choose to live in New York is because when I'm between engagements, as they say, something creative always comes up for me, like 'Julian Po,' or helping teach at NYU, or helping stage a show at Juilliard.
When you move to New York, especially, you feel like you need to be something.
I was thinking of going to London drama schools or to New York, because France didn't accommodate the things I wanted to do in film.
I grew up in D.C. but always had a love affair with New York. I did 'Central Park West,' 'Sex and the City,' 'Law & Order.'
In one respect, it's easier to open a restaurant in New York because you get more media attention than anywhere else. Almost everyone will try a new place once, irrespective of the reviews, because it's a spectator sport.
In my teen years, I was hanging out with adults - Steven Meisel, Francois Nars, Oribe, Paul Cavaco. We had so much fun! We'd go out in New York.
I grew up, until age 6, in Chicago. My parents rented their apartment and, at the end of the Depression, my parents wanted to replicate that situation. So, again, we lived in a somewhat suburban setting outside of New York City, and again, they rented.
I graduated from Brown in 2001, moved to New York, and spent a year and a half just looking up 'Backstage' magazine auditions and grinding.
The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough, good omens appear.
It's super trippy coming to America because we know everything about it - from music and film. I know what a Southern accent sounds like; I know what a New York accent sounds like.
When I graduated from high school, I got accepted to York University, Fine Arts film program.
Under normal circumstances, if the centerpiece of a president's campaign is helping the disadvantaged and we are our brother's keeper, the idea that this same guy has an actual brother living in third-world poverty without any help from Obama, this would have been on the cover of 'The New York Times.' But none of them are touching it.
I came back to New York after college like any number of struggling performers, and you just find that niche where you can have some sort of impact. And for me that turned out to be comedy.
I'm still walking around New York like a tourist staring up at all the skyscrapers. I wave at people, I shake hands, I help ladies with strollers.
This is New York, and there's no law against being annoying.
The Democrats in the Senate adopted a resolution, an amendment, saying that there should be no Guantanamo detainees brought into this country. So, more and more, we're finding the American people on one side, the ACLU and the troglodytes from the New York Times on the other, where they belong.
'Living Single' was on in early 1990s - the show about Queen Latifah living with a bunch of friends. And then there's 'Friends,' and that's called the groundbreaking show about unmarried adults living in New York!
I always wanted to do films. I'd gone to New York early in 1976 and did a lot of theater, but I really wanted to chase the paths of people like Pacino and Lemmon and those guys. Alan Arkin. Film was where I wanted to go.
My dad was a New York City cop. His father was a New York City fireman. And my mother's dad was a city taxi driver.
I moved away when I was young, when I was about 19. I'd literally come from an area with dirt roads and stuff like that, right to the centre of a city of about five million people. It's been great. I'm based in New York, and every day, it's amazing.
The first time I was given money to shop for myself, I was 13 and staying with my godmother in New York. I went to Clinique and bought the three-step acne programme and felt so grown-up.
I've never lived in New York. I've never done a play off or on Broadway, so I think that's in my future. Have that experience - get a little apartment in the city and grow a beard and walk around with earbuds in my ears, and a stocking cap and a big giant scarf.
Halloween is bigger than Christmas in America. I've experienced it in New York, Los Angeles and Washington D.C., and if you're in the right neighbourhood, every house is decorated with spooky ghosts, spider webs, and jack-o-lanterns.
If you erased New York, I hate to say it, if you erased Frankfurt, even London, the world would not have changed.
Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.
When I first moved to New York, I had some colleagues who said I should be my straightest self - whatever that means - when I went into casting offices, but I didn't want to put on an act of what I thought was heterosexual. I just wanted to be myself, and I'm very grateful because I feel like I've been embraced for that.
In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly.
After three years in L.A., I began to dream of my glory days on the boards. But it's very difficult to make a living as a theater actor in New York, which is why I moved out here, and I always had an ambition to work in television. I am a great admirer of the format, and I think it's how we tell long stories.
I think driving in New York is a great experience. A lot more racing techniques go into it than anyplace else I've ever driven. There basically are no lanes.
I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood.
In Chicago it's really a case of the play's the thing - people are just so happy to be acting, you know? We were all actors - not like in New York or Los Angeles, where everyone says they are actors but they are actually waiting tables and hustling for spots in commercials.
In L.A., I'm always going to dinner and hanging out. In New York, it's like my life just feels crazier, and there's more options.
There are certain vulnerabilities and insecurities that go along with not being linked to another person in a contractual way, even if it's an unspoken contract. People in New York manage that pretty well. I prefer choice and desire over convention and limitation.
In 2007, a very inspired New York University Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four per cent, were non-white.
When I moved to the United States, I first went to California to be the chef at Campton Place. As much as I loved California, I really missed the seasons. So when I moved to New York, I had that again.
