For a while, I couldn't get arrested in television because everybody thought of me as that guy on 'Trapper John.' So I thought, 'Great, I'll come out here to New York and do some theater, and when they get tired of me, I'll do something else.'
I've lived in New York City all my life. I love New York City; I've never moved from New York City. Have I ever thought about moving out of New York? Yeah, sure. I need about $10 million to do it right, though.
I always thought I would move to New York after graduation, but, instead, I moved to Los Angeles. I realized I was more scared of that choice than I was of New York, and I thought, at 22, I should get it over with.
Something I realized when I moved to America: people get these general American accents, but when they get angry or upset or excited, their original accents come out. It's something I noticed with my manager, because he's from New York, and the first time he got angry, he suddenly had this accent.
You can get stuff done in New York that you can't in Los Angeles. If you wanted to get some milk and get your shoes repaired and drop something off at the dry cleaner, that's an all-day adventure in Los Angeles. In New York, you can bang that out in half an hour.
No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
I live in L.A. so I don't get to see much theatre anymore. They have a lot of touring shows but it's not like New York - I lived in New York for 15 years and you can walk out on the street and there's something to see.
I'm from New York and I love New York and I'm always repping New York, but what I represent is something deeper than just being a New York rapper.
Being in New York is an almost overwhelming experience. While Washington, D.C., is my favorite American city, I regard New York City as the most amazing city in the world. No other comes close. It is an incredible, inexhaustible engine.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
I always thought it's not that the greatest players in the world come from New York. It's just the guys who shouldn't have made it, they came from New York. That's what makes New York special.
I'm not leaving New York. And neither is anyone else. We're here. We are quintessential Americans - we're not only American, but New York-American.
I went to Europe in '52 or '53, and when I came back, I stopped in New York. I remember looking out of a window on a glorious October morning and there was New York. And I thought, 'I'm coming here. This is for me.'
I would come to New York, work, and then get out of New York. I didn't go out to dinner with other people on the Management Committee. I didn't socialize. I didn't politick.
The New World Order is a more palatable name for the Anglo American world empire. It's the planetary domination of London, New York, Washington over the rest of the world. It's hard to get people to join that or think they have a part in it if you called it the Anglo American world empire. If you call it the New World Order, then people in India or some place like that or the European Union might think, "Well, there's something there for us too." But that's not what it is; it's the Anglo American New World Order.