Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best New Jersey Quotes from famous authors such as Adam Pally, Brian Fallon, Jack Antonoff, Sharon Kay Penman, Wiz Khalifa. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
Growing up in Livingston, New Jersey, was terrific.
2
The Clash will always be from London, and we will always be from New Jersey. But New Jersey doesn’t create us.
3
I went to high school in New York City. So, I grew up in New Jersey my whole life, and I was watching all the people and all the kids that I met there become so jaded.
4
Many people don’t know that New Jersey is a fertile breeding ground for writers, some of them quite renowned. And I would wager that most would be truly startled to learn that the star in the Jersey firmament is – drum roll here – Newark.
5
Philly is more East Coast than Pittsburgh. It’s closer to New Jersey and New York, so the vibe is way more fast-paced.
6
Many of my books are set in New Jersey because that’s where I was born and raised. I lived there until my kids finished elementary school. Then we moved to New Mexico, the setting for ‘Tiger Eyes.’
7
Two records put me over the top with hip-hop. One of them was ‘Planet Rock,’ and the other had no lyrics – it was called ‘Numbers,’ from a group called Kraftwerk. Every kid in the ‘hood in New York and New Jersey was popping, locking, and breaking to that record. It was the hottest track on the street at the time.
8
When I got the call of being drafted by the Devils, I was in shock more than anything. I didn’t have a clue where New Jersey was, but it was just nice to be taken in the first round and nice to know where my future would be, which organization I was going to be a part of.
9
It’s just an honor to compete in New York, New Jersey, the tri-state area, where we’re from. I have so much roots there, so much family.
10
If you’re in Alabama, you’re selling tax incentives – with all due respect to Alabama – because what else are you going to sell? In New Jersey, you’ve got location, public education, highly educated workforce, density, diversity, infrastructure.
11
My dad’s from New Jersey, so I used to go to America a lot. I feel like it is a second home.
12
I feel like if you’re in Jersey, you have to be a Jersey Devils fan. Anybody born within the confines of the border of the state of New Jersey, I feel, should be a Jersey Devils fan.
13
Growing up in the ’80s in central New Jersey as a weird kid with a blue mohawk listening to the Sex Pistols and dressing really funky, I was bullied pretty badly. It was every single day in elementary school and kept going into middle school, too. I felt totally alone, without a single person there for me.
14
Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.
15
‘The Sopranos’ only reflected the tenor of how things are done in New Jersey. They didn’t invent it. And I say that as a fan of both ‘The Sopranos’ and New Jersey.
16
The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it’s Whitman, who lost his job for ‘Leaves of Grass,’ or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose ‘Howl’ was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you’re going to put yourself in jeopardy.
17
Otherwise, I spend a lot of time at my boyfriend’s home in the country, in New Jersey.
18
Growing up in New Jersey, everyone wanted to be a tough guy. That meant baggy pants that fell down, big T- shirts, and chains. I couldn’t imagine wearing tight jeans, as I thought it was dorky. Now I look at pictures of me then and think, ‘Yeah, you looked dorky.’
19
I like movies and radios and Bruce Springsteen and New Jersey. That’s what I like, and if people don’t like that, well, literally you can go on iTunes, and there’s hundreds of other bands you can listen to.
20
The most horrifying thing I ever did was work as a steward on an airplane. I wanted to get hired by United. I thought, ‘With my languages, this will be amazing; I will work in First Class.’ But I could only get a job with an airline going from Newark, New Jersey to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
21
My family moved from California to New Jersey in the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I will never forget the first day in a new school, walking into the cafeteria during lunch and not knowing a single soul. I didn’t feel confident enough to share a seat at just anyone’s table.
22
I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it’s both. It seems like I’m always leaving my home. That’s part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
23
I was born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Madrid, Spain. Then I moved to New Jersey.
24
The burden of student loan debt weighs heavily on both students and families across New Jersey.
25
If you’ve seen me on ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ or ‘The Real Housewives of New Jersey,’ you know that I find myself in hot situations far more often than I’d like.
26
New Jersey residents deserve to have their tax dollars spent on transportation and infrastructure projects right here in the Garden State instead of being wasted in Washington.
27
New Jersey is very big. There are different areas of New Jersey. There is North New Jersey. There is like the center. There are a lot of actors from New Jersey that don’t speak with a New Jersey accent.
28
The National Guardsmen and women in New Jersey have been on the front lines of our fight against COVID-19.
29
Conscious of our many problems, I seek today to lay a foundation to our public policy. My fundamental purpose is to devote my term of office to raising the standard of public service in New Jersey.
30
On its surface, the HBO documentary series ‘Hard Knocks,’ about the New York Jets’ training camp, resembles another HBO series, ‘The Sopranos.’ Both star the stout patriarch of a New Jersey ‘family’ preoccupied with food, intimidation, and florid profanity.
31
I just want everybody to know my music and get to know my squad, Remy Boyz; just to show people New Jersey. New Jersey got talent, too. I mean, everybody sleeps on us, and they put us as the underdog.
32
Growing up, watching the New Jersey Devils, I watched players like Ken Daneyko, Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer, old school players who respected the game.
33
I still remember the first gig where I got people going, it was Rascals in New Jersey, and the place was packed. I was scared. People were expecting me to be funny. I gotta be honest, every time I walk into a club, it’s that same fear.
34
Community stuff is always important to me, it’s very important to the New Jersey Devils and the organization, so along with not just myself but the rest of the players on the team, it’s always a priority to be able to give back in the best way possible.
35
I first got online in the late ’80s when I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. I was a reader, into Jorge Luis Borges, and I found, connected to, and delighted in a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark, that I met online.
36
Growing up in New Jersey, bat mitzvas were all about the elegant parties.
37
When the USS New Jersey is commissioned, it will be a source of pride for everyone in our state for decades.
38
I can’t say for sure where I was headed the first time my mom put a blue blazer on me. Church, probably. West Side Presbyterian in Ridgewood, New Jersey, specifically, where my blazer was paired with a clip-on tie and a pair of khakis for a Sunday morning with my fellow congregants.
39
We are keeping New Jersey one step, several steps, ahead of terrorism.
40
For some 25 years, I worked as a librarian, first at the New York Public Library, then at Trenton State College in New Jersey. My life has always been with, around, and for books.
41
I don’t love the whole Hollywood mentality, but I do love the weather and how motivated everyone is around here. It motivates me to make fun music. I’m an East Coaster – I’m from New Jersey, so I’ll probably feel like that forever.
42
My first job was at Proctor and Gamble in Cincinnati, my second job was at a pharmaceutical company in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. My third job was at Palmolive. And I realized, three jobs in three years, maybe it wasn’t the job. It had to be me.
43
No matter how you slice it, limiting the SALT deduction forces New Jersey families to spend even more to subsidize Americans in less economically productive states, which take more than they ever give back to the federal government.
44
A rebel. That was me when I was younger. What was a rebel from New Jersey? A rebel was moving to the Village, not sleeping with top sheets, not eating a hot breakfast in the morning, not having 20 rolls of toilet paper and 10 boxes of Kleenex.
45
My grandfather left Cuba when Castro came into power and literally left everything. He had two suitcases and two kids and showed up in New Jersey and waited for my uncle to meet up with him. Imagine – there were no cell phones back then!
46
Michael Sanchez and I grew up in New Jersey, not far from here, playing soccer together. When I was in high school, I worked to start an organization to help senior citizens, which I learned a great deal from.
47
I’m pretty crazy about the Yankees. When I can’t actually watch a game, I TiVo it. I am also a die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan. I don’t tell many people that because I will get made fun on because I’m from New Jersey!
48
Telling parents in New Jersey you want to act isn’t exactly like telling them you want to be a doctor or a dentist. There are no guarantees. It’s hard, but all the arts are. Can you imagine the pain of writer’s block?
49
I want the people of New Jersey to jump off a cliff like Kurt Vonnegut so I can show them how to fly. This way, nobody needs to grow any wings, which would be impossible anyway because we’re humans and not some kind of bird.
50
I was raised poor, in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Cuban immigrants.
51
My writing is really intuitive. As a kid, I went to school in New Jersey and hung out in New York, so the way kids used to talk got into our earlier songs.
52
I went to school to learn to be a hairdresser. I worked at a wholesale florist, where I delivered to florists all over New Jersey. I’d come home and go out to work down at the Shore. The early jobs, I remember, were $5, $6 a night. And I lived in the projects right until the time I became successful.
53
I am obsessed with trash TV. I watch all reality shows. I watch all the ‘Housewives.’ I am a huge fan of ‘New Jersey.’
54
With the incredible rate of growth of autism diagnoses in New Jersey, it is critical that we support the research, education, and access to services that individuals on the autism spectrum and their families need.
55
Springsteen is a hero to a lot of people in New Jersey. He’s a role model – because he’s a local guy who got out.
56
I may catch some flack for this, but the Jersey style I feel is just very different from New York. When I hear a Jersey MC spit, I can just hear New Jersey in them. To where as NY, that style has been broadcasted so nationally that it’s just a natural sound in music.
57
New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.
58
My boyfriend is Italian and from New Jersey, so naturally he was thrilled to meet Joe Pesci.
59
I’m from Texas, so we used to wear our pants starched down like a cowboy. So when I got to New York, to New Jersey, everybody was laughing at me like, ‘Look at his pants! His pants could stand up by themselves!’
60
When you say, ‘I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore,’ people always say, ‘Oh, really?’ They think of the TV show. So I just say, ‘A cute little harbor town in New Jersey.’
61
The results of a new study are out this week saying that New Jersey is one of the most livable states in the country. The study has a margin of error of 100 percent.
62
I started buying vinyl records when I got into punk music because, in the punk scene in New Jersey, vinyl was more like a necessity than a luxury.
63
Given my last position, that I was the first U.S attorney post 9/11 in New Jersey, I understand acutely the pain and sorrow and upset of the family members who lost loved ones that day at the hands of radical Muslim extremists. And their sensitivities and concerns have to be taken into account.
64
As soon as I got out of law school, I went to inner city Newark, New Jersey, to become a housing rights lawyer, because people fought for my housing rights, I was going to pay it forward by fighting for others.
65
I was born into a middle class family in New Jersey. My dad came home from serving in the Army after having lost his father, worked in the Breyers ice cream plant in Newark, New Jersey. Was the first person to graduate from college.
66
I love Minnesota. The cold is fine with me, being from New Jersey.
67
Growing up as a kid, we moved all over the country on a fairly frequent basis, from New Jersey to Texas, California, Illinois… we moved 21 times in my first 17 years.
68
There was this darkness about being from New Jersey.
69
I’m from the dirty depths of New Jersey.
70
I play a girl called Patti in the film ‘Patti Cake$,’ and she’s a girl from New Jersey, and she dreams of being a famous rapper.
71
As I climbed the electoral ladder – from state assemblyman to mayor of Woodbridge and finally to governor of New Jersey – political compromises came easy to me because I’d learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them.
72
I was the teenage kid growing up in New Jersey watching the Tony Awards and thinking, ‘Oh, maybe if I’m lucky I’ll make it to Broadway by the time I’m 40!’
73
If you look at suburban education in New Jersey and New York, it’s pretty strong, intact, doing a pretty good job. You cap taxes for those communities, can we reasonably predict it’s going to be as strong 20 years from now?
74
I was born in New Jersey, but it doesn’t sound like I’m from a certain region.
75
When I go to Lockheed or General Motors… all those union members are gun owners. They believe in responsible gun ownership and responsible gun safety, but all those guys are gun owners, and that’s not necessarily an issue in New Jersey.
76
I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey. There was this tiny area of Summit where most of the black families lived. My parents and I lived in a duplex house on Williams Street.
77
I actually have sang at a wedding before! My old hairdresser from New Jersey, I sang at her wedding.
78
If you were to ask me about a mistake I have made, it’s calling my fourth album, ‘New Jersey’, because for the first time in my life, we were compared to the E Street Band.
79
I never watch ‘Sopranos’ reruns back home. As far as I am concerned, the nuclear family is still sitting around the luncheonette in New Jersey, munching and chatting, safe and together, and that’s how it ended for me.
80
I was made welcome in New Jersey. They were excited to have me. They told me they expected me to have bad games, and they expected me to have good games. That allowed me to gain confidence and continue to get better.
81
I love the Memphis sound. When I was 16-and-a-half, with my driver’s permit, I was playing New Jersey clubs in a 10-piece band; we had a horn section and would play great, great songs like ‘Hold On! I’m Comin” and ‘Knock on Wood’ and ‘Midnight Hour.’
82
The Great American Outdoors Act is landmark conservation legislation to protect our public lands, including right here in New Jersey.
83
I think it would be a great honor to get another Super Bowl, but not just limited to that. Other events, sporting or otherwise, I think New Jersey has an enormous opportunity given our location and our natural resources, our passion generally and specifically for sports, I think we’re a natural.
84
New Jersey fans are the most ruthless fans in the country for booing and hating on whatever’s in the ring if they don’t like it.
85
In New Jersey, judges have ruled that a same-sex couple or a single person applying to adopt must be given the same place in line as a married man and woman. I think that’s bad for kids. This makes me homophobic? I’m in show business. Half the people in my life are gay.
86
You see, one of the things about being a Housewife, and a New Jersey Housewife in particular, is that most of the drama seems to happen behind the scenes when the cameras aren’t around.
87
The people of New Jersey sent me to Congress because they are tired of partisan gridlock. They want to see our Congress get to work on legislation that will make people’s lives better.
88
I have some Russian friends. But probably only 10 percent. I don’t hang out usually in the big Russian communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
89
Families in my community have seen their taxes go up because of the SALT deduction cap and as a result are questioning whether or not they can afford to live in New Jersey. The loss of the full SALT deduction puts an undue hardship on them.
90
In New Jersey, we won in ’95, but after that for four years we never had a sniff at it. The next thing you know we went on a run of three Stanley Cup Finals in four years in 2000, 2001 and 2003.
91
No matter the challenges ahead, I will never stop fighting for New Jersey and the values we share.
92
Growing up in New Jersey, teen clubs were your life. I’m not kidding! That was it. I was literally tied up five days a week with teen clubs; my parents would drop me off. Like, I didn’t even drive.
93
I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-’70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.
94
My dad’s a teacher and a football coach, and he found a job in New Jersey.
95
One of the greatest things about our band is that we bring the American dream to the world. Here’s a bunch of kids that were living in nowhere New Jersey, and we made it through a lot of practice and a lot of work and a lot of luck. It shows the world, ‘If we did it, you can do it.’
96
Philadelphia merely seems dull because it’s next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.
97
New Jersey shaped who and what I am. Growing up in Jersey gave you all the advantages of New York, but you were in its shadow. Anyone who’s come from here will tell you that same story.
98
I was elected to fight for the people of New Jersey, to win federal investment in our infrastructure, to strengthen our health care, to address gun violence, and get back our SALT deductions.
99
There’s a high school in Camden, New Jersey, I call the Jill Scott School. It’s the Camden Creative Arts High School. Those teachers and kids are so passionate about what they do, and 98 percent of the senior class went on to college.
100
From Picatinny Arsenal to our great universities, New Jersey is leading the way to ensure our nation is secure and our service members are protected with the best possible equipment.
101
I grew up, a kid in New Jersey.
102
I was engaged once In New Jersey. But the engagement ended, because I had music on my mind. I had nothing to offer her except a dream.
103
I started training at a local gym in New Jersey, and the day of my high school graduation, I packed up everything in my car and moved to Coconut Creek, Florida, where I trained with one of the best gyms in the world, American Top Team.
104
In school, when we lived in New Jersey, we went to Broadway a lot, so I saw a lot of Broadway plays, and I just loved being able to see people play a different character and, you know, be able to be themselves at the end of the night. So, I’ve always wanted to do it.
105
I partied too much. I was still 19, 20 years old. I was coming from a little small city where there’s 40,000 people, so being in New Jersey, New York, being with a big All-Star like Stephon Marbury, he’s calling me every night to go out with him. I didn’t know how to say no.
106
For me, the first thing I fell madly in love with when I was little, was, Gilda Radner had this live performance that she had done at the Met that was on tape, and I could rent it from Video Video in New Jersey where I lived, and so I literally would rent it every two weeks.
107
I’ve played golf everywhere in New Jersey. People are nice to me. It’s great.
108
Where I grew up, in New Jersey, there was a lot of organised crime activity. It was a part of life.
109
This corridor is important to national security and important to the whole Northeast. So it’s not just our own New Jersey transportation needs: it’s the whole rail corridor here we’re talking about.
110
My rookie year, Byron Scott didn’t really want to sign me. In New Jersey, the New Jersey Nets. I got there, and Byron Scott didn’t really like me, but they let me come to camp and I was having a great camp. Stephon Marbury embraced me.
111
The women’s movement was slow in coming to suburban New Jersey.
112
I also love horseback riding in New Jersey.
113
The British invasion was the most important event of my life. I was in New Jersey and the night I saw the Beatles changed everything. I had seen Elvis before and he had done nothing for me, but these guys were in a band.
114
I’m not Laverne Cox. I’m not Janet Mock… I’m just a girl from New Jersey who has experience and lived.
115
New Jersey was like home for me the first time I was there.
116
I feel very connected to New Jersey.
117
I’m from New Jersey. But I went to school in Los Angeles and all across the country. So, I can totally connect with missing home.
118
I was raised in a very religious home with two parents who were deeply involved in the black church. When I was young, I went to a small black AME church in New Jersey.
119
If I meet someone who’s Native American and I don’t know anything about indigenous people in New Jersey – which I kind of don’t, which is not really good – I can learn more and more about their lives, and that makes me a more open person and a more accepting person.
120
I landed in New Jersey, where I could barely speak English, and I had to figure out what a short brown kid was going to do in this big white world.
121
I took a job at a factory in New Jersey to try to save money to go to Europe. When I took the job, I set a date for quitting. I was going to hitchhike around, be a hippie, see the world. I just wanted to be responsible long enough to get up the money to get there and trip around.
122
Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.
123
Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth’s great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia.
124
I grew up in New Jersey and my father was a golf pro, so I was groomed for sports, but I wasn’t very good, so my interests lay elsewhere.
125
The very first time I ever heard anything of mine on the radio, I was in New Jersey, and I was in my teens. I did my first record, which was an old standard called ‘My Mother’s Eyes.’ It was the old Georgie Jessel theme. I heard it on local radio out of Newark. And it was very exciting!
126
I grew up in the northernmost parts of New Jersey, known more for lush forests and old farmland than industrial wastelands and fist pumping.
127
I’m a good Jewish boy from Edison, New Jersey, so I went and saw ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ because you have to: that’s part of your bar mitzvah experience.
128
I have the Pleasure to assure you Congress pay particular Attention to the Defence of New Jersey, and hitherto have denied us nothing which we have Asked for that Purpose.
129
Part of my job is to make sure the Northeast is part of our defense industrial base, and New Jersey has always played a role.
130
I came from a prep school in New Jersey, so I get that when I got to FSU, some people weren’t sure about me – I didn’t play in Florida or Texas or at a powerhouse high school.
131
I miss my family, and I miss the New Jersey beaches. They have beaches here in L.A., but they aren’t the same.
132
If we can survive being married and working on a soap together, commuting back and forth when we lived in New Jersey, and we didn’t get divorced then, we’re never gonna get divorced.
133
I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.
134
My father went to Rutgers, and I grew up in New Jersey, so I’m a great Rutgers fan. I have season tickets.
135
I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. A fan of Jorge Luis Borges, I found a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark – perfect strangers – whom I connected to online and immediately became enthralled by the idea of virtual communities.
136
By the time I was in first grade, we had settled in New Jersey, and that’s where I grew up, outside of Philadelphia, right in the heart of Eagles country.
137
I love America, and parts of New Jersey remind me of Newfoundland – rolling hills and gardens – it’s great! I guess that’s why they call it the Garden State.
138
And then we moved to New Jersey and I went to the Art Students League.
139
My grandfather was a wealthy and respected merchant in Montclair, New Jersey, where I was born. But his estate was wiped out in the Great Depression, and as a result, I had what I consider the ideal upbringing: We were a proud family, good citizens, and we didn’t have a sou.
140
As far as value is concerned, the principal reason that I moved to Texas from New Jersey many, many years ago was because I recognized that Texas was a much more entrepreneurial state than New Jersey, that the opportunities to start things were greater in Texas. And my vision was fortunately fulfilled.
141
I would never try to measure fame; I’m really just a regular chick from New Jersey.
142
Before I was a reporter, I worked at a record store in New Jersey.
143
I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn’t being cultivated.
144
I grew up in northern New Jersey – the banlieue of New York – and I now live in Brooklyn. I am separated from my parents by about 50 miles, but really there is almost no distance between us. I speak to them nearly every day.
145
My parents came here from Colombia during a time of great instability there. Escaping a dire economic situation at home, they moved to New Jersey, where they had friends and family, seeking a better life, and then moved to Boston after I was born.
146
Girls Incorporated of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey continues to advance their cause and to strengthen their community by aspiring to open a Girl’s Center for Philadelphia.
147
When I was 13, I moved from New Jersey to Germany with my family. The high school was so supportive of my dream to continue with my theater training; instead of taking PE, I would get credit for dance lessons.
148
I was a high school senior and home alone one night with my younger brother. And a guy – gunman – kicked in our front door at our home in New Jersey and held the two of us captive. We escaped. He caught us again. We escaped again. So, a pretty horrific experience.
149
Dishonesty is Trump’s hallmark: He claimed that he had spoken clearly and boldly against going into Iraq. Wrong. He spoke in favor of invading Iraq. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11. Wrong. He saw no such thing. He imagined it.
150
Contaminated water is not a problem limited to Flint. Think of New Jersey, where school fountains were found to contain unsafe levels of lead. Or the EPA’s 33,000 superfund sites, which are highly-polluted areas that require long-term clean-up operations. The problem is so large that it feels insurmountable.
151
It was tough doing ‘Underneath the Lintel’ in New Jersey in the wintertime, but rewarding. Those audiences were lively and interactive. On-stage was great, but off-stage was difficult.
152
Enzo Amore, the guy you see on TV, existed in a gym in New Jersey long before he ever took to a TV screen.
153
I have a great T-shirt that I received at the New Jersey Hall of Fame when I was inducted. It says – it makes me choke up – it says, ‘I’m a Jersey tomato’… I am. I am a Jersey girl and proud of it.
154
Now, in New Jersey, we have more government workers per square mile than any state in America. But since I’ve been governor we now have fewer people on the state payroll at any time since Christie Whitman left office in January 2001. That’s the right direction, Mr. President, not the wrong direction.
155
New Jersey is to New York what Santo Domingo is to the United States. I always felt that those two landscapes, not only just the landscapes themselves but their relationships to what we would call ‘a center’ or ‘the center of the universe,’ has in some ways defined my artistic and critical vision.
156
I left the South in 1963 and was living in Morristown, New Jersey, when the March on Washington took place, so I watched it on television instead.
157
Seven-11 is the pulse-beat of America. I think that Bruce Springsteen should do a song about a 7-11 in Asbury Park, New Jersey, but write it in such a way that American’s youth can identify and slurp along with the Boss. Hail the Boss! Hail 7-11!
158
When I voted against the cap-and-trade bill, the phone rang and it was the chief of staff of the president of the United States of America, Rahm Emanuel, and he started swearing at me in terms and words that I hadn’t heard since that crossing the line ceremony on the USS New Jersey in 1983.
159
I’ve got the best parents you could ever ask for. My parents are from New Jersey, and they met in Vermont in college. My Dad grew up listening to heavy, psychedelic music. He’s my biggest fan.
160
So much of the bitterness that the term ‘McCarthyism’ evokes refers to the probe begun in New Jersey in the summer of 1953 – both in the laboratories of Fort Monmouth and in the surrounding communities of Red Bank and Belmar, where some of the best scientists and engineers in America worked.
161
In late 2004, I left my much-maligned home state of New Jersey for the supposedly greener pastures of Astoria, Queens. I’d finally be in the mix, living off the subway line, able to go from audition to audition during the day and from late night show to late night show in the wee hours of the morning.
162
I was born in New Jersey and lived there until I was about 10, so Jersey is in my roots.
163
If you grew up where I grew up, you would experience a very different criminal justice system than Camden, New Jersey.
164
My mother was an elementary school teacher for 35 years and taught at the Nixon School in New Jersey. I was raised as a very liberal Democrat, and she was protesting Nixon when he was in office.
165
Many people assume that since New Jersey is a wealthy state with a high per capita income that a lot of these issues of poverty and hunger don’t exist, and the fact is that they do.
166
I remember a show in New Jersey several years ago when a big fight broke out in the crowd. I took the microphone and introduced Frank Sinatra. He wasn’t there, but even the guys creating the disturbance stopped to look.
167
Cold weather probably played a bigger role in bringing back the hat, but sadly, the hat common to New Jersey guidos, South Carolina rednecks, Idaho potato farmers and Los Angeles gang bangers is the ubiquitous ‘tractor hat,’ which is derived from the cheap baseball style cap with the adjustable plastic tab.
168
I have nothing but the best memories of growing up in New Jersey. Of course, I grew up in a nice town, a suburb. But Tenafly was right next to Englewood, which had a tremendous amount of racial tension in the ’60s. So I was aware of the real world.
169
Then I was working in a store in Newark, New Jersey, and I saw an actor in person, and I got so excited. My whole day changed. That’s when I decided to challenge myself to make my dreams become a reality.
170
Growing up in a New Jersey suburb, my Catholic faith was an important part of my young life, shaping the way I approached the world.
171
Sometimes, if I need assistance on the government level, I can appeal through official channels. For example, when I bought the New Jersey Nets, President Medvedev raised the issue with President Obama, who voiced support for the idea, which is always a nice thing to have going for us.
172
Nabokov began writing ‘Lolita’ before he ever knew of Florence ‘Sally’ Horner, an 11-year-old who was kidnapped from Camden, New Jersey, in the summer of 1948.
173
I write novels about women, except for one: ‘Rococo’, about a man, a New Jersey decorator. But even that book had a woman on the cover.
174
I sent my personal check to the Planned Parenthood of Northern New Jersey. My wife and I do every year.
175
It’s not that I’m universally loved. We know I’m not in New Jersey. But what they do say in New Jersey is, ‘We like him, and we think he’s telling us the truth.’ I think we need to have that type of politics on the national level.
