quotations about New York
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
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"
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
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: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.
HARRY HERSHFIELD
attributed, Rand Lindsly's Quotations
The power to run New York is ephemeral; the structure rests on unsure foundations. The ten men who run New York do not combine their power, the group changes, month to month and year to year.
EDWARD N. COSTIKYAN
"Who Runs New York?", New York Magazine, December 23, 1968
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
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
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"
To outsiders, it may seem that that fusion of souls called New Yorkers has arthritis in its middle finger from overuse. But it is merely people's way of greeting each other as they run around like ferrets on double espressos with little or no time to make illiterate requests upon the art of conversation.
BERT RANDOLPH SUGAR
introduction, The Ultimate Book of New York Lists
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
In New York you've got to have all the luck.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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"