NEW YORK QUOTES
quotations about New York
As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.
DOROTHY PARKER
"New York at 6:30 PM"
Power in New York is nurtured, fussed over, married, loved, faked and hoarded. New York is as much a city of power as Boston is a city of background, San Francisco a city of style and Los Angeles a city of celebrity. Power is New York's sex and none of the people living here are unconscious of that fact. Watch the face of an off-duty cab driver in the rain; the painfully slow fingers of a token attendant as a subway rumbles into a station or the deliberate way a patrolman has of writing out a parking ticket. Power in New York is courted like a woman, and even her most ineffectual romancers write of her seduction like erotic monks.
NICHOLAS PILEGGI
"Rules of the Power Game", New York Magazine, December 23, 1968
New York City has 2 million rats. We used to have 8 million rats. Now we're down to 2 million. You know what that means? We lose four electoral votes.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, November 7, 2014
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
City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.
LEON TROTSKY
My Life
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
IRVING BERLIN
Vogue, November 1, 1962
Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines.
DAVID LETTERMAN
New York Observer, September 9, 1991
What I really have a sense of dismay about is that there is a center of anything. I think maybe Cleveland can use one. Also possibly Los Angeles needs informed cultural guidance and a place to go get it. But not New York. New York is a center, a world's fair, and a den of thieves, and a house of miracles.
FRANK LOESSER
letter to William Schuman, August 20, 1965
New York looked like painted sets in a sideshow at a carnival where the bearded lady, sword-swallowers, snake charmers, and magicians make their appearances.
CHARLES SIMIC
The Paris Review, spring 2005
New York is the capital, the national headquarters of homelessness.... No one feels he belongs here.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
The House of Twenty Seven Gardens
New York is a six-reel movie, with the film running backwards, sideways, cross-ways, but never in sequence. Nobody seems to be going anywhere, but is in an awful hurry to get there.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Manhattan madness
You've got me at last
I'm like a fly upon a steeple
Watching seven million people
IRVING BERLIN
"Manhattan Madness"
I'm laying out my winter clothes and wishing I was gone,
Going home, where the new york city winters aren't bleedin' me.
PAUL SIMON
The Boxer
New York may be the city that never sleeps, but it sure does sleep around.
BRIAN BENDIS
"AKA Ladies Night", Jessica Jones
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
The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose
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, February 9, 1984
If Paris was the city of the eighteenth century and London was the city of the nineteenth century, New York is unquestionably the city of the twentieth century. It is a city of almost unimaginable opulence, a place electric with possibility, the setting for technological wonders that scrape the heavens, and the acknowledged center for opportunity. Yet amid the wealth and technological marvels is another city, a city that resembles Dante's Inferno. This is the place of the underclass, an ambience of dope and violence, horrors that defy the imagination, and a fascination with consumption. It is unsettling to think that ... one wrong turn on a highway can alter one's comfortable existence into the dark and unpredictable world of incivility and barbarism.
HERBERT LONDON
introduction, Housing in New York: Study of City
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 saw a robin redbreast in Central Park today, but it turned out to be a sparrow with an exit wound.
DAVID LETTERMAN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes