“New York City has changed enormously. My gut impression of it now is t...” — Gerard Malanga Quote

New York City has changed enormously. My gut impression of it now is that it's like being in a sci-fi novel: 'Blade Runner' syndrome. Nothing seems real anymore; everything is pre-packaged.

Be happy in what you do. Be respectful of yourself. Do good works for others, and the goodness will come back to you and make you a better person. I think that's what happiness is all about.

Whether it's a poem I'm working on or a picture I've snapped, it all has to do with the curiosity I feel without thinking about it.

When I started writing poetry in my senior term of high school - I was sixteen - I felt in touch with a secret language. It gave me a sense of identity. I suddenly discovered I wasn't alone.

It used to be true that to succeed in the creative class, you had to move immediately to where the action was. It was how you made connections, how you got auditions, how you found an audience and funding and some attention for your craft. But not anymore.

I used to love looking at a recipe, getting all the bits and pieces in the shops, getting them ready and prepared... I don't really have the time to do that anymore.

The level of study that I was at, I was probably only about two or three years away from being ordained as a rabbi, so I really needed to figure out in my head where I wanted to go with things. And I just couldn't do it habitually anymore.

I guess now music is so saturated and so microwaved. It's, like, 15 minutes in the microwave and boom, you've got something. Nobody's putting passion or any thought behind it anymore.