I was born in America but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.
My nana was always a widow as long as I was alive; my grandfather died before I was born. All the women on my street - there were four houses in a row with all old women who lived alone who were widowed. They all had kids, but they were all widowed. My mom didn't put me in preschool; I didn't know that was a thing. I just hung out with these women all day.
Where I grew up, the basketball courts were rarely used.
In Manhattan, and its true on some level till this day; its a whole different mentality from the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, which I didn't know at the time - because you basically just know your neighborhood.
My Italian granny and my mother made great spaghetti, but it wasn't a kind of southern Italian, Godfather-esque kind of thing - it was a wonderful, big mixing pot of all kinds of people - when you came home from school and your mum wasn't in, there were lots of people you could go to.
It's so much easier for me to talk about my life in front of two thousand people than it is one-to-one. I'm a real defensive person, because if you were sensitive in my neighborhood you were something to eat.
I lived in mafia neighborhoods off and on when I was a kid. If you were in Little Italy, in East Harlem, in Brooklyn... Those neighborhoods were, in those years, dominated by mafia families. You knew it and you felt it, you know?
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
Corporate engineers have looked at how women are with each other, borrowing the best tips from female neighborhood culture and then transporting them back into the bosom of capitalism. They've feminized capitalism.
I love Air Force Ones. That's the shoe I grew up with in Philadelphia. My older brothers got me wearing them and I just stuck with them. Everyone in the neighborhood used to wear them. It's retro. It's tradition. That's me, old school.
I was the only white kid in my neighborhood for most of my youth even in high school, so reverse racism was just as apparent as racism.
I saw all those great '70s films when I was 9, and no one in my Brooklyn neighborhood cared if a kid watched an R movie.
We shot the video for 'Broken' where both my parents grew up. There was always a strong sense of serving our country in the neighborhood - my father and all my uncles served, and most of them enlisted.
I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.
You always had a few brothers that was speaking on Islam, like my brother's uncle. It wasn't big in my neighborhood, but with certain brothers, it was big. I respected it because Islam is my home. I found my home when Islam came to me. I've been living with it ever since.
I never really thought of my neighborhood in South Philly as being a neighborhood; it was more a state of mind. For people who aren't familiar with those kinds of places, it's a whole different thing. Like, 42nd Street in New York City is a state of mind.
In my neighborhood, when you've got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him.
I live in a neighborhood where there's a lot of West Indian culture, so it's nice.
Of course there's some things that I would have liked to have... none of my friends growing up had their father in the house. None of 'em. We had uncles and stuff like that, but nobody had a father in the house, none of my friends.
I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.
I have one vivid memory of one of the days that the marches were taking place. We were in a Catholic, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Chicago is a place where people define themselves by their parish and by their ethnicity.
I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on.
I grew up a few years after John Kelly in an identical neighborhood in the other side of Boston and I went to high school in John Kelly's neighborhood. I know the neighborhood John Kelly comes from, I know the culture.
People who live in SoHo want to be close to the energy, culture, and eccentricities of New York's most charming neighborhoods.
Detroit in its heyday - let's say, 1920s to the '60s - was never a huge downtown-living thing. People lived in the neighborhoods.
