My dad grew up in Washington Heights. I grew up in New York in Manhattan. So we're purebred New Yorkers.
I grew up near New York, and there were a lot of summer stock theaters in the area. I started an apprenticing with some of the theaters. Not really acting in them - I did everything else: everything but act.
I lived in Manhattan for 12 years and grew up outside New York City, so that was definitely how I saw the center of the world.
Actually, New York is great for playing around. I made a lot of studies for New York-a big vacuum cleaner lying on the Battery in Manhattan.
For me, Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' defines New York. Both New York and Manhattan Island should be in black in white! I always hear the soundtrack of Gershwin in my head every time I go over the Queensboro Bridge, or come in from JFK because of it!
In the neighborhood that I grew up in - in New York on Long Island - there were a lot of musicians. For some reason, that time in history in our town in New York, everybody played. So it was all around me.
I didn't have to do that much research to present a post-apocalyptic New York because I basically grew up in that New York. That old New York is gone, and that's one thing that's undiscoverable now but I explore in my fiction.
I grew up in New York, and I grew up with a mother who was an arts lover herself, and I went to these New York City public schools with these great arts education programs, so it was something that I was lucky enough to be able to be exposed to very early.
I think with success you do get a little more guarded and you start to change your friends. You become more isolated. And you start hanging around with people who have money! I think that's the biggest thing. Once you do get a bit of change in your pocket, you start hanging around with other people who have some change. It was kind of strange to all of a sudden go from one extreme-Manhattan-to where I went, upstate New York. But I did it because I was dying in the city. I couldn't take it. I couldn't take one more dinner party. I couldn't take one more party, period.
I grew up a little north of New York City and went to high school at Regis, an all-boys tuition-free high school in Manhattan.
I moved to New York when I was eight years old, in 1978. I grew up in Manhattan. I couldn't speak any English, and I had dyslexia, so it took me many years before I could read.
I went around to see the shows in New York, ending up at the Circle Company one night. I fell in love with the people and started hanging around. It was a family. I liked the way they talked and the quality of work. I learned everything there.
New York was always more expensive than any other place in the United States, but you could live in New York - and by New York, I mean Manhattan. Brooklyn was the borough of grandparents. We didn't live well. We lived in these horrible places. But you could live in New York. And you didn't have to think about money every second.
I grew up around New York, graffiti culture.
I just got back from New York, and I realized in New York, it's very difficult to hear a New York accent. It's almost impossible, actually - everybody seems to speak like they're from the Valley or something. When I grew up, you could tell what street in Dublin someone's from by the way they talked.
If you were brought up in the '40s, a kid in Ossining, New York, hanging out at the poolroom and stealing, how can you think, 'Here I am in Ossining. I, too, can be a movie star!'