You can be anything you want to be. You can be a street sweeper, if you want. Just be the best blasted street sweeper you can be . . . And, you know you can be mayor.

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

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

I finished law school in '56, but I was working two jobs.

I love kids and I maintain that they are our future, that we adults owe them the ability to achieve their potential and that we don't own this planet. We hold it in trust for them.

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