New York City Quotes

“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

“Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
― Nora Ephron

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
― John Updike

“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.”
― Truman Capote

“Chapter 1.
He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion...no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yeah. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.'

Uh, no let me start this over.

'Chapter 1.
He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles...'.

Ah, corny, too corny for my taste. Can we ... can we try and make it more profound?

'Chapter 1.
He adored New York City. For him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in...'

No, that's going to be too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here.

'Chapter 1.
He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage...'

Too angry, I don't want to be angry.

'Chapter 1.
He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.'

I love this.

'New York was his town, and it always would be.”
― Woody Allen, Manhattan

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I hate Brooklyn.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”
― Tom Wolfe

“I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“When you’re in The System, like after being arrested, you’re no longer a participant. You’re being processed. Instead of an easy to ignore, well-greased cog, you become a sharp edge that needs to be ground down.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sixth Borough

“Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.”
― Dorothy Parker

“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

“People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.”
― Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York

“...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves

“There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?”
― Woody Allen

“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 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—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I'd die for my fans.”
― Lady Gaga

“Think about it this way—if we die together, you won’t have to mourn me.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sixth Borough

“I wanted solitude, but a treasure like that didn't exist in the city. I only found silence in Central Park, still littered with people of course, but the only place that held moments of calm. I breathed in that wonderful silence as my pace finally slowed, and nature delighted my senses.”
― Lee Matthew Goldberg, Slow Down

“Life in New York was like being in a giant bookstore: all these trillions of paths and possibilities drawing dreamers into the city's beating heart, saying, I make no promises but I offer many doors.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“You can do what you like, sir, but I'll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, New York

“You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

“New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“I once started out
to walk around the world
but ended up in Brooklyn,
that Bridge was too much for me.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

“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

“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! 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. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“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