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It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.
AGATHA CHRISTIE, Life magazine, May 14, 1956
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
AYN RAND, The Virtue of Selfishness
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
ROLAND BARTHES, In the Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
My hair is always at its best in New York. I don't know what's in the water. It could be mousse.
ELLEN DEGENERES, TV Guide, Nov. 21-27, 2005
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
PETER SHAFFER, New York Times, Apr. 13, 1975
In New York, we're out of road salt. So for the next big storm they have to use parmesan cheese.
DAVID LETTERMAN, Late Show with David Letterman, Oct. 31, 2011
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
ANGELA CARTER, New Society
This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul ... its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.
O. HENRY, "The Making of a New Yorker"
New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.
DAVID LETTERMAN, Late Show with David Letterman, Feb. 9, 1984
- I’m laying out my winter clothes and wishing I was gone,
- Going home, where the new york city winters aren’t bleedin’ me.
- New York, you got money on your mind
- And my words won't make a dime's worth a difference, so here's to you New York.
ART GARFUNKEL, A Heart in New York
New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.
HENRY MILLER, Tropic of Cancer
I love autumn in New York City: The yellows, the browns, and the rust — and that’s just the drinking water.... Here in New York City, the leaves turn — and run.
DAVID LETTERMAN, Late Show with David Letterman, Sep. 7, 2011
In New York you've got to have all the luck.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
New York City subways are now getting high speed Internet. How about some high speed subway trains?
DAVID LETTERMAN, Late Show with David Letterman, Jul. 27, 2011
In New York freedom looks like too many choices.
New York is like a big dinner party. You have to be very careful about what you say and do because you never know whose feet are touching under the table.
SUSANNA MOORE, In the Cut
- 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"
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 is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages.
JAMES M. CAIN, The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978
New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves ... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness.
HENRY MILLER, Tropic of Cancer
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