quotations about New York
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States ... and when the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
KURT VONNEGUT
Bluebeard: A Novel
Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.
HELEN KELLER
Midstream: My Later Life
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
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"
Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, Paper Magazine, September 17, 2014
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
America Day by Day
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
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Forbes, 1992
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
I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later.
JOAN DIDION
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
You know what's great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. If you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it's great and you're having a good time and you haven't been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from, you know what? You're in!
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
The Layover
For in that city, there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
EVELYN WAUGH
Brideshead Revisited
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
PETER SHAFFER
New York Times, April 13, 1975
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
Broadway, In ambuscades of light,
Drawing the charmed multitudes
With the slow suction of her breath--
Dangling her naked soul
Behind the blinding gold of eunuch lights
That wind about her like a bodyguard.
LOLA RIDGE
"Broadway"
The bureaucracy of New York is an insane system of contending and competing private and public commissions and agencies, warring against each other, modeled on feudal fiefdoms. Acknowledging no central authority, each local lord pursues his own interests, eager to extend his decision-making dominion.
BARBARA ROSE
"Why No One Is Making New York Understandable", New York Magazine, September 25, 1972
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.
LE CORBUSIER
When the Cathedrals Were White
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
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