I love children, and most of my involvement now has to do with children or youth programs.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.

Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now, that may be a bit much for those who don't come from New York, but clearly we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advantages.

My mother came here to New York. She and my grandmother were domestics, cooking, cleaning for other people.

As a matter of fact, even when I finished law school, I had no notion of public service then.

And I tell people I'm in charge of children, children I haven't even met yet.