New York City Quotes

One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either.

~ Terry Pratchett

Tradition does not mean a dead town, it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago, I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

~ G.k. Chesterton

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

~ Colum Mccann

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.

~ Willa Cather

It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan. Customers quitting the island for Astoria or Cobble Hill would claim to welcome the change of pace, saying it would be nice to finally have a garden or live a little closer to the airport. They’d put a good face one it, but one could always detect an underlying sense of defeat. The apartments might be bigger and cheaper in other places, but one could never count on their old circle of friend making the long trip to attend a birthday party. Even Washington Heights was considered a stretch. People referred to it as Upstate New York, though it was right there in Manhattan.

~ David Sedaris

New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand.

~ David B. Lentz

Guys like you can't escape the city. Hell, you a got a blood contract with this place. You're married to the old girl.

~ Mickey Spillane

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

~ Jonathan Franzen

I'm bound to say that New York's a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I'm a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.

~ Charles Whibley

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.

~ John Lennon

He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.

~ Arthur Phillips

People don't dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in Moscow or Beijing or Baghdad or Kabul. People risk their lives to come here---to New York. The greatest city in the world, where dreams become reality.

~ Sean Hannity

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

~ Joseph O'neill

people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into.

~ Joseph O'neill

New York always feels more like my hometown than the places where I actually grew up (which weren't far from New York), perhaps because I did my artistic growing up while working in this crazy, wonderful city back in my twenties. Although I love the quieter, slower, nature-rich life I live now in the sheep-dotted hills of Devon, there are ways in which I still feel more truly myself here in New York, more than anywhere else. Even after all this time in the desert and on Dartmoor. Strange, isn't it?

~ Terri Windling

Give my regards to Broadway,Remember me to Herald Square,Tell all the gang at 42nd Street,That I will soon be there;Whisper of how I'm yearningTo mingle with the old time throng,Give my regards to old Broadway,And say that I'll be there e'er long.

~ George M. Cohan

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.

~ Vincent Scully

East Side, West Side, all around the town,The tots sang Ring-a-rosie, London Bridge is falling Down;Boys and Girls together, me and Mamie O'Rorke, Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.

~ James W. Blake

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

~ Jonathan Lethem

In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?

~ Mark Twain

Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.

~ Ann Douglas

Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to the image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.

~ Melissa Febos

It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.

~ Susan Ertz

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.

~ Irwin Shaw

I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.

~ Richard Price

I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.

~ Colum Mccann

Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.

~ Henry James

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history.

~ Henry James

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

~ Anna Quindlen

To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.

~ Dallas Athent

When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.

~ Neil Simon

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.

~ Edward Conlon

That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

~ Andrew Vachss

It is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest how is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.

~ Anna Godbersen

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone?

~ Herman Melville

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.

~ Henry James

New York is a granite beehive, where people jostle and whir like molecules in an overheated jar. Houston is six suburbs in search of a center.

~ Nigel Goslin