A Quote by Pete Hamill
There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.
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I read a lot of those Single Girl in New York books, like "Fear of Flying," where you could sort of put yourself, through transference, into the Jewish Girl in New York situation.
I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.
Dickens's final book, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, 'The Last Dickens'. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens.
A lot of people have trouble with their second novel - the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren't very good.
I love London; I could totally live here, actually. I'm in New York most of the time, and it really reminds me a lot of New York.
I don't know if it's the sunshine, or the fact that I actually have a job, but I do like L.A. a lot. In New York, it can be gray and rainy and cold, and you still don't have any money, and you feel like a bad Dickens character.
I follow my own nose. So I read things that are different. People will always say to me, "Have you read Robert S. Bosco's latest novel?" or "Have you read so and so's history of Peru, which is reviewed in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and has a buzz about it?" I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm like from another planet. I'm a pygmy from the jungle.
I've seen a lot of brands fail because they went, 'Hey, look, we're from New York, and that's what we're all about.' But wherever you go, people are proud of where they are. So even though we're from New York, what we do is a mindset: it's got to work in Japan, in Los Angeles, London, wherever.
When I am in London, I think my favourite city is London, but when I am in New York, I feel it is New York. It is very hard to choose between the two.
London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.
I used to live in New York, and I know a number of people who have friends who work at galleries. I spent time hanging out with them, going to openings. It was a good way to do research, to hang out and to look at the art that was present.
I have to say, opening up in New York taught me a lot about that level of attention to detail. London's a tough market, Paris is a tough market, but New York, well, that's extraordinary.
One big disturbance, I think, between L.A. and New York is that New York is so condensed and together that it's very hard to be private there. There's a lot of constant interchange, people know what you're doing all the time. Here in L.A. it's the opposite, it's very spread out, unless you make a conscious effort to go someplace and look at something, you don't see it and we hear about it. So in that sense, it's a city where you can be very anonymous if you want to be, or even if you don't want to be.
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.
But there is something very nice about coming to New York and how everyone smiles - even if they don't mean it. When I go back home to London and say hello to people, they look at me like I'm crazy.
There is something very nice about coming to New York and how everyone smiles - even if they don't mean it. When I go back home to London and say hello to people, they look at me like I'm crazy.
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