Where's the best place to see the Manhattan skyline? Brooklyn Heights is a lovely area, very picturesque, and you can kind of see Manhattan from the Promenade. That's another nice walk. If you decide to go to Brooklyn, you could walk along the Promenade and see most of the Manhattan skyline. From Flatbush Avenue, in Brooklyn [where the skyline scene from Saturday Night Fever was filmed], you just see all of southern Manhattan. The other view of New York that I love is when you are coming in from Kennedy Airport on the Long Island Expressway toward New York. You sort of see all these buildings, and then the city starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger. New York literally looks like Oz. It truly does.

After you arrived, what did you discover that people don't know? The big misconception about New York is that it's a tough city to get to know and a tough city to belong in. Having lived all over the world, I discovered that the contrary is true. It is a city of great community, a tremendous sense of belonging. People live in these really kind of tightly focused little areas. It's like living in a small town. People always say that New Yorkers are the most provincial people in the world. In a way, we are, because we care so much about our city. It's a place where everybody is incredibly tolerant, like everything goes here. You can kind of do and be whatever you want, and yet you are able to have community and also a certain amount of anonymity at the same time. There is a tolerance, like, hey, be who you want to be no matter what, but you can still belong.

Where do you send your friends to stay when they come to visit? There's a cute little guesthouse in my neighborhood, the Abingdon Square Guest House. It's a little town house. The other place I love is the Inn at Irving Place, in a beautiful area of New York, Gramercy Park, which is just incredibly charming. That is just a lovely place to walk around.