A Quote by Martin Scorsese
My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.
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I'm going to show you the real New York - witty, smart, and international - like any metropolis. Tell me this: where in Europe can you find old Hungary, old Russia, old France, old Italy? In Europe you're trying to copy America, you're almost American. But here you'll find Europeans who immigrated a hundred years ago - and we haven't spoiled them. Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world's in New York.
My parents separated before I was 1 year old. I moved in with my aunt and uncle when I was in fourth grade. I was, like, 8 or 9 years old. I was getting in a lot of trouble when I was in Southern California. My older sisters were in gangs. My older brother was in gangs.
My father died five days before I returned to New York. He was only fifty-three years old. My parents and my father's doctor had all decided it was wiser for me to go to South America than to stay home and see Papa waste away. For a long time, I felt an enormous sense of guilt about having left my father's side when he was so sick.
My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.
The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.
I love Chicago. It's one of the great cities. I'm crazy about the town. It reminds me of New York when it was at its best, the New York that used to be and is no more. I love the architecture, the old stuff and the new stuff.
My father gave me an old Olympia portable when I was in fourth grade. Our ancestors came from Ireland. Our family stories of immigration helped me understand more about my characters in 'The Lemon Orchard.'
Jerry Orbach was the first person to take me to the Friars Club. It's a beautiful building, and you walk into these halls of comedic history and meet these old cats who could tell you a million stories about how things went down in New York City.
I had moments with my father that were exquisite - the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me.
My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.
Here's the weird thing about me. I was never one to tell you stories about me. I was always the guy who others told stories about. I was like that up until I was 35 years old. And then I started telling stories about me onstage.
I wanted to be an actor ever since I was five. My grandparents - my mom's parents in New York - were stage actors. I think indirectly I wanted to do it because of them. My grandfather would tell me stories about Tennessee Williams and actors he worked with in New York. He had such a respect for acting and such a love for storytelling about that world. I grew up hearing him tell tales of it.They were never encouraging me or discouraging me to take part. They were always feeding me with theater.
An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.
There used to be a club in new york called Bradley's - I've never been there, it closed in the 80's - but I used to study with Junior Mance, and he would tell me about Bradley's. It was a very important place for a generation of jazz musicians in New York. It was really all about pianists there.
All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me.
What I really have a sense of dismay about is that there is a center of anything. I think maybe Cleveland can use one. Also possibly Los Angeles needs informed cultural guidance and a place to go get it. But not New York. New York is a center, a world's fair, and a den of thieves, and a house of miracles.
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