I am a dark-skinned, nappy-headed, scar-faced dude from the streets of Brooklyn. I can't hide from being who I am. It's all over my face.
I was born the day before the March on Washington. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Everybody in my neighborhood was a Democrat. We just didn't have any Republicans, because anyone running as a Republican was very out of touch with what our community needed.
Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan. . . . Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
I really consider myself a Californian, but I have those great comedic roots in Brooklyn.
I didn't appreciate Brooklyn until I left it.
Able Danger was a top-secret military planning operation, established in '99 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to identify cells of al-Qaida worldwide and to take out al Qaida terrorists. They identified five cells worldwide, one of them in Brooklyn.
New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness. . . . There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory in Their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.
Also, I preached to gangs on the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx - and miracles began to happen.
Brooklyn is a hub; people move to Brooklyn because of what's already in Brooklyn.
I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, and I consider myself lucky and blessed to be where I am - just working.
In Brooklyn, it was as though you were in your own little bubble. You were all part of one big, but very close family, and the Dodgers were the main topic of everybody's conversations and you could sense the affection people had for you. I don't know that such a thing exists anymore.
I had been DJing a dance night in Brooklyn and witnessed the response people had to "The Devil's Dancers" - Oppenheimer's one hit song. All these young people were dancing to this amazing song, completely unaware of whether it was current or not. It was from 1982, but sounded very current. It made sense that a physical record should exist for this song again. It seemed the obvious choice to represent what Minimal Wave was going to be.
I'd say my sound's really rooted in Jamaica and Barbados heritage , infused with just me growing up in Brooklyn, really, and being an American kid.
CNN? Oh, that's that network with Larry King, who, like the Son of Sam, is a native of Brooklyn. Used to be owned by Ted Turner, who, like the Cincinnati Strangler, is a native of Cincinnati. Now part of Time Warner, founded by the Warner Brothers, the oldest of whom, Harry Warner, like many Auschwitz guards, was a native of Poland.
I remember perfectly my first trip to New York, when I was on the bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, when I saw the skyscrapers. It was like an incredible dream.
I'm a tough old broad from Brooklyn. I intend to go on acting until I'm ninety, and they won't need to paste my face with make-up.
'Dear God,' she prayed, 'let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. '
Farrell's Bar in Brooklyn had urinals so large they looked like shower stalls for Toulouse-Lautrec.
It's much tougher to be a restaurant critic now. You have to take a subway out to Brooklyn. I wouldn't want to do it.
The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.