My grandfather was from outside of Moscow, and my grandmother, although some of her family were French, was from Odessa. They met as immigrants in New York in the early '20s. My mother's family came over from Ireland generations ago.
There's something different about growing up black and Muslim, especially in New Jersey. It's like when I left the mosque and I left my dad, I felt unprotected, but I also felt a weird sense of pride, like I was involved in this other way of living that was cool to me.
I'm always looking for a kind of new musical entity to sort of move into a motion picture venue.
I wanted to do new things with dance, adapt it to the motion picture medium.
My new motto is: When you're through changing, you're through.
One reason why upturns follow downturns is that downturns tend to overshoot. People get panicky, they're afraid to stay the course, so they start selling. The other thing is that I think, as entrepreneurs keep on waiting to produce new things, that there's an accumulation of as-yet-unexploited new ideas that keeps mounting up.
In my hometown of New Orleans, grief is a public spectacle that, somewhat paradoxically, necessitates celebration. The dead are not mourned so much as they are posthumously venerated with music and dance.
New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.
I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!
For 10 years, I gave away my possessions every year and moved on to a new place.
I want to get into some television. There might be a perception about me being only a movie actor, you know, and there's this whole new sort of frontier opening up in that medium.
People are goofy about the movie business, so you end up counting on friends you knew before you were successful. It is harder to make new friends because you are a little more cautious.
My first job was in a movie theater. I worked at Cinema 6 in New City, New York. I was an usher. I sold popcorn.
Life is much more available in New York - there are a dozen movie theaters within walking distance. Living in California is easier, but you get sedentary.
I wasn't hanging around the movie theaters in New York where I grew up, a Manhattan brat.
One of the most common reasons people renovate their homes is a change in their lifestyle - an upcoming wedding, a new baby, or grown children moving away.
As much horror as we have always created, we are a species that keeps moving forward, seeing new sights in new ways, and enjoying the journey.
For the three years I lived in New York leading up to moving out to Los Angeles for 'Mad Men,' I was an office temp at Ernst & Young in Times Square. That's about as desk-jobby as it can get. There was a lot of, 'Go two floors up and make a copy of this and then bring it to me.'
New York was scarier than Baltimore ever was. It was terrible in the '70s. I'm glad they cleaned it up. I got mugged; I had to go to the hospital. Every time you went out, you got robbed. It was horrible. You can't imagine.
During my jury selection process, we went through over 360 jurors. It took six months, all New York residents. Of the 360 jurors, over half of them had been mugged one time. Quite a number of them, maybe 30 40, 50, had been mugged twice.
