One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn’t move to New York to make a fortune.

I realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

I’ve had the good fortune and blessing to run for the offices for which I really wanted to do the work.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

New York is definitely ready for the word of God.

It’s very fun to be the hunter of the sounds. The hunter of the right energy. And it’s not really about if every sound is correct; it’s more the energy – if it hits you in some way, it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s not perfect. I’m still very excited while hunting for songs.

Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?

Remember that before ‚Roe v. Wade‘ was decided, there were four states that allowed abortion in the first trimester if that’s what the woman sought: New York, Hawaii, California, Alaska. Other states were shifting. And people were fighting over this issue in state legislatures.

I come from Detroit where it’s rough and I’m not a smooth talker.

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

My life is the road, man. I need to keep moving.

I came to New York to be a fine artist – that was my ambition.

I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

I’m not trying to take New York by storm. I just want to sneak in there, keep my head down, batten down the hatches and cook.

I always tell people that if I move anywhere it would be Toronto.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

The word ‚romance,‘ according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.

People are really talkative in New York. Someone always comes up to me and says ‚Hi‘ during the day.

I saw MotoGP on TV first, before I saw F1 and other types of car racing. It’s what I got more into. It was cool, there was good, exciting racing.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

I do a little thing about the way people shake the sweetener packet. You know, like they’re all excited. I want to get all the granules down to one end. I love all these rituals.

It took Simone a long time to understand why people want Daddy’s autograph. I’d tell her, and my wife would tell her, too, ‚People see Daddy in the movies, and they are excited to meet him.‘ But she couldn’t really grasp it.

March is a month without mercy for rabid basketball fans. There is no such thing as a ‚gentleman gambler‘ when the Big Dance rolls around. All sheep will be fleeced, all fools will be punished severely… There are no Rules when the deal goes down in the final weeks of March. Even your good friends will turn into monsters.

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

Everybody accuses me of moving fast when I direct a picture. I don’t move fast, but I just keep moving.

Diligence is the mother of good fortune.

I have moved to a smaller house in Paris, and I don’t fancy having so much staff now.

In London, you’ll be walking around and, ‚Oh, there’s the ground.‘ Every area of the city has a Premier League club. They all survive; they all exist with enough money, and that’s good.

I remember coming to New York in 1974 to do a play here called ‚Equis.‘ And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets, and I thought, ‚I’m home.‘ I felt really at peace here.

Americans move more than 10 times over the course of a lifetime.

If I’d known how much packing I’d have to do, I’d have run again.

The city is a body and a mind – a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information.

It’s no secret that in New York during the last 30 years there has been a tragic exodus from the churches into materialism, secularism and humanism.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

When I’m back in New York – and this is a terrible thing to complain about – I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I’d like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It’s kind of like being in the Mafia.

A family shares hardships and a connected history.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

When I go to a restaurant, yeah, I know that a line is probably going to form in front of the table, but didn’t I always wish for that? Yeah, I did.

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

I live in Hollywood, but you can’t make me love Hollywood. I’ll never love Hollywood.

Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you.

I’m very excited about having the Internet in my den.

My show ‚The Big House‘ was picked up; they flew me to New York. I’m about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart’s ‚The Big House.‘ And a hand grabs my shoulder, ‚Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.‘ It’s a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can’t.