quotations about New York
New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
In vain does the stranger look for the New Yorker type, the man of the classy magazines. Instead he sees nervous, gaunt-faced men by day, and evening-clothed, dull-eyed, prematurely old men at night, hurrying, hustling, scrambling, rushing, wither nobody knows.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays
New York is a woman, holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand, and strangling the earth with the other.
ALI AHMAD SAID
"The Funeral of New York"
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
JOAN DIDION
"Xanadu", NY Daily Quote, August 8, 2010
I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.
RICK RIORDAN
The Last Olympian
Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the fearful cry of a too-well-known voice finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island of un-reality.
ALBERT CAMUS
American Journals
New York is unfinished. But business goes on just the same. Business is continuous. Everything else in New York is subservient to business. If New York would only stop talking about its side shows, its buildings, its Broadway, its class, its style, its civic pride, and put a sign at every approach: BUSINESS GOING ON DURING ALTERATIONS, people would know what to expect and many outside visitors would be saved disappointment.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays
New York is itself an act of will, and to live in and with New York requires a matching set of will. One must be prepared to love New York without requiring that it love you back. The New York Nationalist understands this early; he senses that New York is too large, too grand, too much an idea in itself, too filled with multiple universes of function and feeling to care about any of us, one at a time.
PETE HAMILL
"Notes of a New York Nationalist", New York Magazine, June 5, 1972
I became disenchanted with New York when I realized that I felt as if I had accomplished something when I picked up the laundry and got the Times and a quart of milk. I spent a lot of time worrying about alternate-side parking. I lived on the fourth floor of a brownstone. If I had messed up and hadn't jockeyed my car to the right side of the street for the next day and somebody moved their car at four o'clock in the morning, it was an automatic response, in winter or summer, maybe I put my slippers on, but I would run down in my pajamas and get that place. All of a sudden I thought, This is absolutely ridiculous.
ANN BEATTIE
The Paris Review, spring 2011
New York City subways are now getting high speed Internet. How about some high speed subway trains?
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, July 27, 2011
Out of the night you burn, Manhattan,
In a vesture of gold--
Spun of innumerable arcs,
Flaring and multiplying--
Gold at the uttermost circles fading
Into the tenderest hint of jade,
Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues,
Robing the far-flung offices,
Scintillant-storied, forking flame,
Or soaring to luminous amethyst
Over the steeples aureoled.
LOLA RIDGE
"Manhattan"
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it -- once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
JOHN STEINBECK
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
In New York you've got to have all the luck.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.
JOHNNY CARSON
The Tonight Show
New York--the Upper West Side more specifically--this was the city of my choosing. I went to college there, then graduate school, but was certainly not from there, never rooted, always transient. I finished school and stayed, still feeling as though I were on some kind of long-term student schedule, on an emotional visa that let me stay as long as I liked without ever becoming a resident. I carried a Tennessee driver's license for 10 years after I stopped living there and only gave it up when it was pickpocketed from my bag. In Manhattan, it didn't matter. I didn't need a license. I had no need for a car. You needed to rent a car only when you intended to leave the city, which I could go months without doing.
TOVA MIRVIS
"From Somewhere", Boston Globe Mazazine, September 28, 2013
When its 100 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. When its 10 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. There are two million interesting people in New York. There are 78 in Los Angeles.
NEIL SIMON
Playboy, February 1979
Old New York City is a friendly old town
From Washington Heights to Harlem on down
There's a-mighty many people all millin' all around
They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down
It's hard times in the city
Livin' down in New York town
BOB DYLAN
"Hard Times in New York Town"
Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer.
DONNA SUMMER
attributed, Rand Lindsly's Quotations
Of course, in Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car.
GEORGE CARLIN
Brain Droppings
The genius of survival here is not to make one's self into steel; you become bamboo, bending in the wind, not snapping.
PETE HAMILL
"Notes of a New York Nationalist", New York Magazine, June 5, 1972