The New York Philharmonic is a tremendous opportunity, a great orchestra.
And to understand this, I think this is a most important point where I would like always to be understood what we do with the New York Philharmonic. That the meaning of the music is number one.
I was always running off to the city, whether it was Philly or New York, going somewhere where there was something more for me.
I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the Air Force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm.
This line of research continued when I went, and brought my research group with me, to the new University of California, Irvine campus in 1966 to become the founding Dean of the School of Physical Sciences.
There's a lot of talent out there with just the normal physique. The 'cross-fit' type physique - that's the new exercise that took over.
We used to move pianos in New York City, and one time, it was, like, eight guys on a piano that was made of glass. We were moving it for Alicia Keys.
In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.
Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.
I'd studied acting in New York when I left Pierre - that was the big thing that I did. I worked very hard at it, actually.
When I first came to New York, I would scream like a girl and run to the other side of the street if there was a pigeon. Now I can face off with a pigeon.
I'm quietly becoming New York's premiere actor. People don't understand. They have me pigeon-holed as a comedian.
When I first got to New York, all I did was musicals. After a few years I had to make a conscious choice to close the door on musicals, because I was getting pigeon-holed as a musical theater performer.
I don't want to get pigeon-holed into a certain kind of character. I love action roles and the hero, but I want to keep trying something new.
I am not a fan of rats or pigeons. In New York City, they have become very confident. When I was a child, you went on the subways, and the rats would stay down on the tracks, but now they hang out on the platform.
Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.
If your church is the theatre, New York means a lot - it's a pilgrimage you want to make.
As with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the origins of Shearith Israel trace back to a small group of religious freedom-seekers and a treacherous ocean passage to the New World.
'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.
The thing about me is that I love variety. I like to try new things, and I don't want to be pinned back.
