Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think things will work out for the greater good for not only me but the city of Pittsburgh. I'm extremely grateful to get out in the community of Pittsburgh and not only play the game but affect other people and kids in that regard, and I'm excited about the whole process of that.
I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that, and I remember that level of loving the material and really loving writing about it.
The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a good job as a cartographer in a design studio where I had worked for about four months.
I remember the senior class play I was in. I was also in the musical, although I can't sing at all, but I wanted to be a part of it. Then I was modeling in Pittsburgh, so being in front of the camera was something I enjoyed and benefited from. I made money growing up by modeling locally.
You can be in this league for 10-15 years and not win a championship. My boy, Nelson Agholor, been in the league for three years and got a ring with Philly. That's what we live for and dream for. That's why I think a lot of guys stay in Pittsburgh: because we always compete for championships.
Pittsburgh's definitely the city where I learned how to be on a stage, hold a microphone, and interact with an audience. It's where I got my chops as an entertainer and as a performer, so I'm grateful to the queer community there because they are active and vocal and they care about each other.
Scripts were rather scarce in 1968. We did a lot of Amiri Baraka's plays, the agitprop stuff he was writing. It was at a time when black student organizations were active on the campuses, so we were invited to the colleges around Pittsburgh and Ohio, and even as far away as Jackson, Mississippi.
When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to be a chemist. So I became one. I worked in a laboratory and went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I taught science at a private girls' school. I had three children and waited until all three were in school before I started writing.
As I and the rest of my Pittsburgh Steelers teammates prepared that week in late December 1974, we knew one thing: The road to the Super Bowl in the AFC went through Oakland. To achieve your dreams as a team, you had to slay the Oakland Raiders. They were the barometer of what it took to be a championship team.
I've told so many stories to so many friends of mine. I have friends in Pittsburgh, in West Virginia, and in Indy. That's three different demographics of people, and they all laughed, so I assumed that if I find something funny and all my friends find something funny, I hope people everywhere will find it funny.
Pittsburgh has long sent more than our fair share of young people to defend this country, and our universities are already building the cyber-security workforce of the future. But the training can start earlier, and there is no better group of young people to help us get there than the students who choose JROTC.
There are a couple people who have complained on other teams about some of the things that Pittsburgh players have done. Some of that goes in the category of gamesmanship. Some of that goes to the fact that we need to be vigilant as a league to make sure that players aren't unnecessarily and inappropriately hurt.
To be recognized for making the contributions I did, along with the others who are part of the Hall of Honor, it really is humbling. Particularly when you grow up in Pittsburgh and know what the Steelers mean to the city. To me, as a little boy growing up watching the Steelers, this means a lot to me. It's special.
I am haunted by what my life would have been had I not had the courage in my early twenties to leave Pittsburgh for New York City and really commit to being a writer. Pittsburgh is both post-industrial and provincial, and the opportunities there are limited. It would have been quite easy to simply drift through life.
When I read Mike Webster's file before I began his autopsy, I knew he was more than a 50-year-old heart attack victim. His file and the television reports of the death of the former Pittsburgh Steelers center described a long, steep fall into bizarre behavior. I suspected he suffered from some sort of brain disorder.
I remember my mom threatening me, half-serious: 'You know what? I should take you to Pittsburgh and put you in dance lessons just to keep you occupied.' Well, that brought everything to a screeching halt. 'Jeeze, dance lessons.' In retrospect, it would have been awesome, but then, 'Ugh, dancing - dancing's for sissies.'
Pittsburgh, for a while, became a production centre. There was one $400 million year. Hollywood was bringing productions in there. Films like 'The Silence of the Lambs' and 'Innocent Blood.' So my guys, the guys I worked with, were able to have careers and live at home. But then it dried up, and a lot of my friends left.
One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization' (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.'s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties.
The thing that I always respected about Bruce Arians was, when he was at Pittsburgh, he let Ben Roethlisberger decide what he liked. I used to do that. You can put something in and force-feed it to a quarterback. But if he doesn't like it and have his heart in it, it's not going to be as good as when he really likes something.
I became a poet in Pittsburgh. When I lived in the South, I was a basketball player and primarily a jock. An English teacher essentially suggested that I send the poems that I'd been writing - really just for him - to a few programs, so that when I wound up in Pittsburgh, it's where I figured out that I could actually be a poet.
I went to see the stock exchange when I was 18 years old. I'm not a Wall Street lawyer, I'm a Stanwix Street lawyer. Stanwix Street is a street in downtown Pittsburgh. One of the clients is Mellon Bank, which merged with the Bank of New York Mellon a number of years ago. And I have for years have done software licensing for Mellon.
Kurt Angle, I knew he was from Pittsburgh and I knew his background very well and his amateur days and, of course, going to the Olympics and all that. When he went into professional wrestling, he was very good at adjusting and displaying a lot of great moves. It was something that the fans could look at a say, hey, that's wrestling.
I believe that Ryan Murphy is a genius. His instincts remind me of Andy Warhol. I recently went to the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, and you can see a lot of echoes of Andy in Ryan's work. Like Andy, Ryan's finger is so on the pulse of culture that he's ahead of culture. Their aesthetic and their vision of the world are very similar.
I grew up when one of America's greatest black playwrights, August Wilson, was writing about life in Pittsburgh, but I never saw myself in any of his straight-male plays. And then I see 'Angels,' which was so honest and painful, and it had this black drag queen in it, Belize, with a big heart. I finally had a character to relate to.
I was invited to L.A. when I was 16 for a weekend-long songwriting session by a writer I had met through my voice teacher in Pittsburgh. My first hit, 'Hide Away,' was one of the songs written during those sessions. It was played for a radio rep who then started a new label; the song got a pretty organic start at radio and then took off.
I went in, and there, in the front room, a converted bedroom, sat the first radio I had ever seen. The equipment was so bulky that it took up one entire wall of the bedroom. The set, which could send or receive signals, was tuned to KDKA in Pittsburgh, and I remember being completely flabbergasted at the thought of sounds coming from that box.
The Flight 93 Memorial isn't that easy to get to. It isn't like the memorials in New York City or Washington, D.C., where you may go on a business trip or family vacation. No, in order to get to Shanksville, PA, you fly to Pittsburgh, make your way through the traffic and onto the highway that takes you through the beautiful wooded countryside.
Pittsburgh was the first chance to be in a classroom with other writers, to have conversations with other writers. In fact, after graduate school, I lived in Japan, Ohio and New Orleans, and only upon leaving Pittsburgh did I see what a special community it was for poets, so I was eager to come back. It's a strong arts community across the board.
In a cross-cultural study of 173 societies (by Herbert Barry and L. M. Paxson of the University of Pittsburgh) 76 societies typically had mother and infant sharing a bed; in 42 societies they shared a room but not a bed; and in the remaining 55 societies they shared a room with a bed unspecified. There were no societies in which infants routinely slept in a separate room.