New York Quotes
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You hear little about West End Avenue. It is too genteel to have much taste for publicity. (Quote by - Christopher Morley)
Situated on an island, which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice, from the sea, and like the fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth. (Quote by - Frances Trollope)
You couldn't prove in court that Hollywood was also born on the Upper West Side, but D.W. Griffith was living on West 100th Street when he started in the film business. (Quote by - Peter Salwen)
New York is not a city to return to in defeat. (Quote by - Moss Hart)
Consider Riverside Drive, where residents' senses were assaulted by the horns and steam whistles of the passing river traffic, the clanging of trains passing below the park, and the stench from cattle cars that were sometimes parked for days on their way to the abbatoirs of the West 60s. (Quote by - Peter Salwen)
Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. (Quote by - Frank Lloyd Wright)
Lovers in New York don't turn against it.....because of taxes or crime or decaying public services. They do it because their happiness here is so dependent on illusions, and their illusions collapse. (Quote by - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move. (Quote by - David Letterman)
No other American city is so intensely American as New York. (Quote by - Anthony Trollope)
In New York City, the common bats fly only at twilight. Brick-bats fly at all hours. (Quote by - George Dennison Prentice)
I dug it, New York City, all-the streets and the snows and the starving and the five-flight walkups and sleeping in rooms with ten people. I dug the trains and the shadows, the way I dug ore mines and coal mines. I just jumped right to the bottom of New York. (Quote by - Bob Dylan)
Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me. . . . Me for it from the rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West now to me. (Quote by - O. Henry)
New York is notoriously the largest and least loved of any of our great cities. Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years altogether. A man born forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew. (Quote by - Harper's Monthly)
Only New York could have produced such a welcome. It beat a snowstorm all to pieces. (Quote by - Charles Lindbergh)
There's no room for amateurs, even in crossing the streets. (Quote by - George Segal)
The Empire State, a lonely dinosaur, rose sadly at midtown, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor airships, alas. (Quote by - Vincent Scully)
The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years. (Quote by - Philip Hone)
The world is grand, awfully big and astonishingly beautiful, frequently thrilling. But I love New York. (Quote by - Dorothy Kilgallen)
It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. (Quote by - Pat Conroy)
The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost. (Quote by - Murray Kempton)
In crossing Union Square, in front of the monument to Washington, in the very shadow, indeed, projected by the image of the pater patrie -- one of them remarked to the other, 'It seems a rum-looking place.' (Quote by - Henry James)
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water. (Quote by - Truman Capote)
New York is a great city to live in if you can afford to get out of it. (Quote by - William Cole)
Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my City of Cities float In sunset's golden and crimson dyes: I look and a great joy clutches my throat! Plateau of roofs by canyons crossed: windows by thousands fire-furled-- O gazing, how the heart is lost in the Deepest City in the World. (Quote by - James Oppenheim)
I have never walked down Fifth Avenue alone without thinking of money. (Quote by - Anthony Trollope)
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe. (Quote by - Don Herold)
In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness. (Quote by - O. Henry)
If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination. (Quote by - Dr. James Hillman)
New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it. (Quote by - Saul Bellow)
New York is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. IT is the icing on the pie call Christian civilization. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillacs, and beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses. (Quote by - Duke Ellington)
The exodus from New York City limits to the suburbs in the last two decades was nothing less than spectacular and probably represents one of the greatest unattended migrations in human history. (Quote by - Dave Marash)
Writhing, uncontrollable city! In the years since the city stopped offering garbage collection to Morrisania and Hunts Point, the dogs that roam the streets have been subtly turning into coyotes. (Quote by - Susan Sontag)
Movement in New York is vertical, horizontal, angular, never casual. In Versailles, you bow; in New York, you dodge cabs. (Quote by - Boris Aronson)
This is New York, a combat zone, and everyone has to have an angle or they're not allowed over the bridges or through the tunnels. Let them have their angles, it's what they live for. You've got better things to worry about, like making sure the people that actually matter don't try any funny stuff. (Quote by - Cynthia Heimel)
New York is the Caoutchouc City. . . . They have the furor rubberendi. (Quote by - O. Henry)
Money is made easily by man y in New York; fortunes are acquitted in a day, families go from a shanty on a back street to a brown-stone front in upper New York, but they carry with them their vulgar habits and disgust those who from social position are compelled to invite them to their houses. (Quote by - The Reverend Matthew Hale Smith)
New York was something like a circus performer walking a tightrope an juggling at the same time....It could barely maintain its position, but an movement would tip the whole balance. (Quote by - John V. Lindsay)
Just where the Treasury's marble front Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations,-- Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont To throng for trade and last quotations; Where, hour, by hour, the rates of gold Outrival, in the ears of people, The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled From Trinity's undaunted steeple. (Quote by - Edmund C. Stedman)
Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me. (Quote by - O. Henry)
No place has delicatessen like New York. (Quote by - Judy Blume)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of exiles. (Quote by - Emma Lazarus)
New York is like a disco, but without the music. (Quote by - Elaine Stritch)
It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. (Quote by - E.B. White)
Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life. (Quote by - Robert Moses)
New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from. (Quote by - Fran Lebowitz)
It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders. (Quote by - Simone de Beauvoir)
The borrowers of America and all the world turn to New York....It is to the quotations on the New York Stock Exchange that men of affairs from Penobscot to Honolulu turn each morning to find how beats the pulse of prosperity and enterprise. (Quote by - Charles A. Beard)
And we found other evacuees in the country who sat on their suburban lawns, planning to go back when the children had finished college; and when the rain fell into the leaves of the rock maples they asked: "Oh, Charlie, do you think it's raining in New York?" (Quote by - John Cheever)
The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost. (Quote by - John Jay Chapman)
In its stride, New York takes on one more interior city, to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war. New York is not a capital city-it is not a national capital or a state capital. But it is by way of becoming the capital of the world. (Quote by - E. B. White)
Where else but in an American democracy could a boy of the lower East Side, born in London to parents fleeting Russian discrimination, grow up to be mayor of a pan-ethnic city? (Quote by - Abraham Beame)
It was a cruel city, but it was a lively one, a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh and violent catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and machinery? (Quote by - Thomas Wolfe)
No one has ever seen the skyline of the city from Brooklyn Bridge as I saw it that morning with three hit notices under my arm. (Quote by - Moss Hart)
New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian. (Quote by - Russell Baker)
Stream of the living world Where dash the billows of strife!-- One plunge in the mighty torrent Is a year of tamer life! City of glorious days, Of hope, and labour and mirth, With room and to spare, on thy splendid bays For the ships of all the earth! (Quote by - Richard Watson Gilder)
An interesting thing about New York City is that the subways run through the sewers. (Quote by - Garrison Keillor)
New Yorkers are inclined to assume it will never rain, and certainly not on New Yorkers. (Quote by - Brooks Atkinson)
Living in New York City gives people real incentives to want things that nobody else wants. (Quote by - Andy Warhol)
I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth. (Quote by - James Cameron)
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that new York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young. (Quote by - Joan Didion)
It's much better to be a neurotic in New York than in Nashville. There they liked me but they didn't understand me. Here they like me and understand me. (Quote by - Stanley Siegel)
The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up. (Quote by - Jay Leno)
Every person on the streets of New York is a type. The city is one big theater where everyone is on display. (Quote by - Jerry Rubin)
New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York? (Quote by - Edward Abbey)
There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is-to live, to work. (Quote by - Gloria Naylor)
If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere. (Quote by - Arthur C. Clarke)
New York...when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. (Quote by - David Letterman)
I don't like the life here in New York. There is no greenery. It would make a stone sick. (Quote by - Nikita Khrushchev)
New York is to the nation what the white spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up! (Quote by - E.B. White)
New York is essentially national in interest, position, pursuits. No one thinks of the place as belonging to a particular state, but to the United States. (Quote by - James Fenimore Cooper)
By and large, musicians respect New York audiences, and also are greatly concerned about New York reviews. (Quote by - Harold C. Schonberg)
It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. (Quote by - E.B. White)
Broadway is a main artery of New York life-the hardened artery. (Quote by - Walter Winchell)
A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners. (Quote by - Mignon McLaughlin)
Broadway has always been at the heart of civic affairs and remains so today. The path of almost everyone who lives in or visits New York must cross it at some point. (Quote by - David W. Dunlap)
I miss New York. I still love how people talk to you on the street - just assault you and tell you what they think of your jacket. (Quote by - Madonna)
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. (Quote by - F. Scott Fitzgerald)
New York is great though. If you're here and want a one of a kind souvenir be sure to take home the police sketch of your assailant. (Quote by - Dave Letterman)
New York, the nation's thyroid gland. (Quote by - Christopher Morley)
This is the town that never sleeps. That's why we don't live in Duluth. That plus I don't know where Duluth is. (Quote by - Woody Allen)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me. (Quote by - Walt Whitman)
It 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 other place is good enough. (Quote by - John Steinbeck)
When it's 3 o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London. (Quote by - Bette Midler)
New York is a city that loves what has been called the "Type A" personality: always feeling the press of time, aggressive and competitive, a workaholic, dedicated to achievement. (Quote by - Dr. Anthony Zito)
Most of the people living in New York have come here from the far to try to make enough money to go back to the farm (Quote by - Don Marquis)
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. (Quote by - F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The only real advantage of New York is that all its inhabitants ascend to heaven right after their deaths, having served their full term in hell right on Manhattan Island. (Quote by - Barnard Bulletin)
There was always something immensely comic to her in the thought of living elsewhere than New York. She could not regard as serious proposals that she share a western residence. (Quote by - Dorothy Parker)
New York means many different things to me. It certainly means cheesecake, more species of cheesecake than I ever knew existed: rum, orange, hazelnut, chocolate marble, Italian, Boston, and of course, New York. (Quote by - David Frost)
New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture. (Quote by - Saul Bellow)
New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most of it unsolved. (Quote by - Johnny Carson)
The intellectual life is why I am a New Yorker. It's why I stay here. I spend my summers in Europe and when they ask me if I'm an American, I say, 'No, I'm a New Yorker.' I don't know about everyone else, but for me that's a positive statement. (Quote by - Alexander Alland, Jr.)
No other city in the United States can divest the visitor of so much money with so little enthusiasm. In Dallas, they take it away with gusto; in New Orleans, with a bow; in San Francisco, with a wink and a grin. In New York, you're lucky if you get a grunt. (Quote by - Fletcher Knebel)
By any reasonable standard, Riverside Drive would be considered the best street in New York. Where else, after all, are there such views-not of a narrow river, as there is across town, but of one of the noblest rivers in the United States. (Quote by - Paul Goldberger)
Ideas matter in New York. I am certain that more conversations in New York are about ideas than anywhere else. Not just vague theories, but ideas that New Yorkers have the will, and the clout, to do something about. (Quote by - David Frost)
The wise people are in New York because the foolish went there first, that's the way the wise men make a living. (Quote by - Finley Peter Dunne)
No other place can so convincingly claim to be the capital of capitalism, the capital of the 20th century and the capital of the world. (Quote by - Kenneth t. Jackson)
You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hay-seeds are bailed hay-seeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off for the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other? (Quote by - O. Henry)
My first few weeks in New York were an initiation into the kingdom of guts. (Quote by - Shirley MacLaine)
No matter how many times I visit this great city I'm always struck by the same thing: a yellow taxi cab. (Quote by - Scott Adams)
When a man is tired of New York he is tired of work. And thought. And cheesecake. (Quote by - David Frost)
Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You're tired, you've had a headache since you arrived, but you can't leave because then you'd miss the party. (Quote by - Simon Hoggart)
New York was pandemonium with a big grin on. (Quote by - Tom Wolfe)
It is a communications center, processing and exchanging a steadily larger volume of the world's money, information and ideas; and it is a center that determines a large and growing part of the country's production, investment and labor policies-to say nothing of its taste and culture. (Quote by - Gilbert Bruck)
In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents? (Quote by - Mark Twain)
New York is the city of rampant creativity, of abundant imagination, whether you are in advertising or the theater or the stock market. They are all fields built on imagination, the spinning of ideas and creations, of fantasy becoming reality. It is everything. (Quote by - A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb)
I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies. (Quote by - P. J. O'Rourke)
You're in New York City now, buddy-wipe that silly grin off your face. (Quote by - Baloo)
If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"--that's what they sing. (Quote by - O. Henry)
New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts. (Quote by - Harry Hershfield)
When I left the West Coast I was a liberal. When I landed in New York I was a revolutionary. (Quote by - Jane Fonda)
The city of New York is so overgrown that we in the upper regions do not know much more of what is passing in the lower, nor the things which are to be seen there, than the inhabitants of Mexico and Cairo. (Quote by - Philip Hone)
There is something distinctive about living in New York; over eight million other people are doing it. (Quote by - Don Herold)
Lo! body and soul!--this land! Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and The sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships; The varied and ample land,--the South And the North in the light--Ohio's shores, and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies, covered with grass and corn. (Quote by - Walt Whitman)
People say New Yorkers can't get along. Not true. I saw two New Yorkers, complete strangers, sharing a cab. One guy took the tires and the radio; the other guy took the engine. (Quote by - David Letterman)
Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence? (Quote by - Walt Whitman)
I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and it was the only place where my fears were justified. (Quote by - Anita Weiss)
What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other? (Quote by - O. Henry)
Yet despite all the problems, New Yorkers fell in love with the soaring structure and almost overnight, the Empire State Building became the most romantic and widely recognizable symbol of the city. (Quote by - Ric Burns and James Sanders)
There is a love-hate relationship between New York and the rest of the country, but New York is unarguably the city that sets the standards, the city in which all who have anything to do with the arts dream of working and succeeding. (Quote by - Harold Schonberg)
The city of right angels and tough, damaged people. (Quote by - Pete Hamill)
New York is the dirtiest, largest, ugliest, broken-down city in the world-but it's the only one. (Quote by - Isaac Stern)
Weekdays, New York City's financial district bustles with activity. Its streets are rivers of rushing humanity, its air is thick with the sounds of traffic. (Quote by - Jennifer Dunning)
New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. (Quote by - Paul Auster)
I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth. (Quote by - Anais Nin)
A person who speaks good English in New York sounds like a foreigner. (Quote by - Jackie Mason)
The City of New York, the noblest of the American symbols. (Quote by - James Morris)
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. (Quote by - Helen Keller)
Why, if you are not in New York you are camping out. (Quote by - Thomas W. Dewing)
Early in the century the Times carried an irate letter under the heading ACUTE PHONOGRAPHOMANIACS UPTOWN. The writer was deeply indignant at the 'low songs' blaring from his neighbor's machine ? George M. Cohan, the guilty party in this instance, then lived at 47 West 86th. (Quote by - Peter Salwen)
A priest in New York City was arrested on gun possession. These days, you better be happy that the bulge in his pocket is a .38. (Quote by - Dave Letterman)
The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. (Quote by - E. B. White)
I like the rough, impersonality of New York....Human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions-all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again. (Quote by - Bill Bradley)
Give my regards to Broadway,/ Remember me to Herald Square./ Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street/ That I will soon be there. (Quote by - George M. Cohan)
In Forty-second Street it is a glowing summer afternoon all night: one might almost wear white trousers and a straw hat. (Quote by - Paul Morand)
You absorb the intellectual life, the culture. Without even consciously learning from it, you are stimulated by it. It is almost a passive thing that happens. You cannot stop it. (Quote by - Stephen Tim)
New York is headquarters town, it's the cerebellum and cerebrum. (Quote by - Gilbert Bruck)
On a New York subway you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing. (Quote by - Lewis Grizzard)
