If you're walking through the Union Square subway station - New Yorkers know it's obnoxious and crowded, and in the summer it's too hot - there are always amazing musicians playing, and sometimes there are multiple, different musicians set up in there.

When I came into office, people said, 'Billionaire? How do they live? What do they eat? How do they sleep?' Today, they see me on the subway coming uptown. A couple of people say hi, some people smile and nod. Some people just sleep. It's not an issue.

The hard part on the subway is that you have, let's say, eight hours, but you have to hit these deadlines. From here to here, you can use this part. From this time to this time, you can use that part, and you have to hit them and it gets very stressful.

I hate people walking down the street listening to the soundtrack of their lives which responds to them but not their setting. I hate the overspill of sound which metro and subway riders are oblivious to because they notice no one and nothing around them.

Due to broken windows policing, the following interactions can lead to tickets, arrests and summonses, warrants if tickets go unpaid and, in some cases, violence: jaywalking, sleeping on a park bench, spitting, putting your feet up on the subway, and more.

Having to wake up at seven and go take the subway every morning, having to get over there with all these commuters and see every possible face of humanity and realizing that you're just the same as these other people is actually an amazingly positive thing.

There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.

I've been acting since second grade, and I just remember when I first moved to New York and I was living in Washington Heights with three other actors in this tiny apartment and busting my butt to get to the subway, walking to, like, five auditions in a day.

The problem - not problem, but main thing - for me has been adjusting my kids... Four-year-old twins! I'm waking up in the morning for rehearsal, taking them to school, and then having to go to rehearsal - trying to do a 15-minute warm-up, even on the subway.

I'm practicing a kind of meandering faith, or faithful meandering. I just trust that something is coming. I don't know what it is. But I've been a straphanger all my life; I know what it's like to not know when the next train is coming, but I trust the subway.

When you're directed by social media, I think it's very easy to lose a sense of agency. And you can see it when you go to any subway station, you walk down any street in a city, you will see 70-80 percent of people staring into their phones as they walk or stand.

Every time - well, not every time, but in celebration of a great review or a great accolade, I take the team of Daniel to Katz's Deli for lunch. We take the trip on the subway, we were like 40 or 50 people, and we go in the back room and have a pastrami sandwich.

I take the subway all the time here in New York. I love people watching and trying to figure out everybody's background, especially teenagers - they're so uninhibited when they display puppy love. I concoct stories in my mind: 'Are you guys like Romeo and Juliet?'

My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 - before the subway got there. I've been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12.

When I first started fighting, it wasn't the easiest thing. I didn't have all the money in the world. I was eating Subway once in a while, some packets of oatmeal here and there. It wasn't that bad, but it's because I was fortunate and had good people there to support me.

I'm an east coaster, you know, I'm brought up in Toronto where it's very much, like, kind of a miniature New York in that there's a subway and you're surrounded by people a lot and, you know, you bump into people and you have interactions and you communicate and la la la.

When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn't get in trouble in his neighborhood.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.

It was weird. Like, people came up to me and knew me as Daredevil before any footage had come out. I remember a guy on the subway being like, 'You're Charlie Cox. You're Daredevil.' And I was like, 'Yeah...?' I was barely Daredevil. I hadn't even signed the contract, you know?

There may be a perception that, with franchises, they're all the same, so that limits the ability to experiment. But that's not true. We've always kept two slots open on the menu of each Subway franchise - slots that franchisees can use to come up with their own sandwich ideas.

For me, New York is about anonymity; that's the draw. It's not at all about other people in my business being nearby. It's that I can get on the subway and eavesdrop on conversations that I would never have access to otherwise. That's why I stay. That's why I could never leave.

The celebrity aspect is nothing short of ridiculous, and auditioning is brutal and dehumanizing. Every time I see a pretty young girl on the subway reading sides for an audition, my only thought is, 'Man, am I glad I'm not doing that anymore.' I never feel nostalgia, just relief.

When you read a supernatural suspense story or a ghost story, or a horror story, the evil at play is something that you can dismiss. And I wonder if, in this time, if people really want to be sitting on the subway reading a book about someone releasing a dirty bomb on the subway.

During the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo placed packages on five subway trains converging on Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the packages spread vaporized Sarin through the subway cars and then into the stations as the trains pulled in.

We give great value for our franchisees: They can build a store for well under $200,000. And we have extremely simple operating systems. The preparation is mostly done in front of the customer. That simplicity is really what attracts our Subway franchise. You see it, and you can do it.

I grew up in a small Southern town, and there were white people and black people. Coming to New York to go to Columbia, every time I went into the subway I was absolutely astounded because you see people from all over the world who actually live here - who aren't just here as tourists.

I've been driving in the city for years because, as a stand-up in N.Y.C., you can perform at more comedy clubs a night if you have a car. Getting from club to club by subway is too slow at night and too expensive by cab. So, many comics live far out from Manhattan and drive in every night.

When I was modeling in Japan, I could blend in a little because of my hair, but my roommates with blonde hair got harassed. People would touch their hair and grope them in the subway. Actually, a lot of groping happens in the subway in Japan, but that's probably true of subways everywhere.

Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.

I will say that walking down the street, getting on the subway, taking the elevator, if there's one or two people and they say, 'Great job, Mayor,' that is a real turn-on. I mean, anybody that wouldn't find that satisfying, rewarding, exciting, thrilling - I think they should see the doctor.

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

The most successful Subway customers, of course, are the ones who can't keep their hands off their sandwich. Join your artist in the sandwich assembling process. That sneeze guard is a suggestion. That sneeze guard is trying to intimidate you into staying on the customer's side of the partition.

'The Food Network' was just starting in New York, and I was getting lots of attention from Mesa Grill. They had no money, so if you couldn't get there by subway, you couldn't be on. It wasn't like TV was something I really wanted to do - but I knew it would be great publicity for my restaurants.

In the United States in 2009, more than 10.2 billion trips were taken on transit trains and buses. So far, the nation has not experienced a major transit attack since Sept. 11, but the March 2010 Moscow subway bombings and earlier train attacks in London and Mumbai show that we must be prepared.

Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the kinds of things that our enemy is trying to do.

The weird thing about the subway is no one looks at each other. So I play the O2 in London. It's a 20,000 capacity venue, and then I'll take the subway to my gig, and everyone's going to my gig, and no one looks at you. If anyone does, they say, 'Hey, you look exactly like James Blunt, only smaller.'

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.

I've thought about bringing my children to retrace my own steps of the morning of September 11, 2001, but they're too young for that. Maybe when they're twenty. Maybe by then, even though it's been only a short subway ride away for years now, I'll have the nerve to see the 9-11 memorial for the first time.

I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book.

In 1946, the year I was born, Yankee Stadium was only 23 years old. But from my perspective as a boy, it had been around forever. At age seven, I saw it for the first time. As I grew older and was allowed to navigate the city's subway system on my own, I went to Sunday doubleheaders with friends on a regular basis.

With a track like 'White Christmas,' everybody has done that song in every format you can imagine, so I just looked at the chords at that particular song and what chords would make it work. That's kind of quite a sad song, and I had this idea of someone singing it in the subway, someone who is homeless, old and sad.

I love New York. I first came here with my Mom when I was in 9th grade. I took the subway for the first time and the doors closed between me and my Mom, and I was so scared. I could see her through the window and I didn't know what to do. I got off at the next stop and she caught up to me, but I couldn't stop crying.

On film, when you're driving home from the set, you realize what you should have done, but it's too late. When you're taking the subway home from your play, you realize what you did wrong, and you go back the next night and you do it better, or you screw it up again in a different way. It's a different thing altogether.

My breakthrough was when I began to write during my commute, at first taking notes on my Palm Pilot, and then moving on to writing full prose on the tiny QWERTY keyboard of my iPaq smartphone. I got so fast that I was averaging 400 words during the 35 minutes or so I spent on the subway each way, or 800 words round trip.

Harlem was a development, a developer's dream and a place where residents had more space and more amenities than ever before. The subway reached 145th street about 1904, and it seemed that Harlem's destiny was to become largely a preserve of successful ethnics relocating and arriving. Then, overnight, the bust took place.

Deprived of the opportunity to judge one another by the cars we drive, New Yorkers, thrown together daily on mass transit, form silent opinions based on our choices of subway reading. Just by glimpsing the cover staring back at us, we can reach the pinnacle of carnal desire or the depths of hatred. Soul mate or mortal enemy.

My dad has always been very proud of me but I think I have exceeded his expectations. When I told him I wanted to be an actor and moved to New York City, I think he assumed I would be playing the guitar on the subway and collecting spare change in my guitar case. The fact that I'm not doing that means that I'm a huge success.

I think sometimes in the focus on deep friendships and on romantic relationships, we can lose sight of how important the small connections we make are with strangers and with people that we may encounter for just a few seconds or a few minutes, whether it's the barista at our coffee shop or the stranger next to us on the subway.

The last time I saw Ted Kennedy was a generation after my first meeting, at the Senate subway below the Capitol on Obama's Inauguration Day. He was his usual gregarious and gracious self - with beaming smile and booming voice wishing my husband and me good luck with our pregnancy and expressing his excitement about the new president.

If you're seeing a psychiatrist, you're wasting money because all you've got to do is get on a plane, get on a subway tomorrow and, inevitably, you're going to be seated in front of some guy who's playing with himself, and he'll be singing, 'Happy Days Are Here Again.' I tell you - when I see that guy, I feel pretty good about myself.

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