quotations about New York
I can't see heaven but I credit hell--
I live in New York so I know it well.
JOHN BRUNNER
Stand on Zanzibar
Visitors to places like New York are amazed to see the way in which Serbs and Croatians, Sikhs and Hindus, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Jews and Palestinians, all seem to work and live together in harmony. How is this possible when these same groups are spearing each other and burning each other's homes in so many places in the world?
DINESH D'SOUZA
"10 things to celebrate: Why I'm an anti-anti-American", SFGate, June 29, 2003
In order to love New York you have to hate it too. It's like a love affair--you don't hunger for it till it's out of reach, and when you've had your fill, you need to separate. When you return, some of it is unfamiliar, but, oh my god, the beauty of it.
CONNIE EISENSTAT
New York Magazine, November 10, 1980
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?
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
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
Breakfast at Tiffany's
A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush.
LADY GAGA
Twitter post, June 11, 2010
New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand.
DAVID B. LENTZ
The Fine Art of Grace
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
ROLAND BARTHES
In the Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
"Mostly Harmless"
No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
E. B. WHITE
"Here Is New York", Holiday
Everything in New York is for sale, including the honor of the City itself. To deny it would be considered dishonorable on the part of a New Yorker of the present day. Culture has been swallowed up by barter.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
H. L. MENCKEN
attributed, Violence and Mediation in Contemporary Culture
Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spent in New York.
HARRY RUBY
attributed, Rand Lindsly's Quotations
New York is like a big dinner party. You have to be very careful about what you say and do because you never know whose feet are touching under the table.
SUSANNA MOORE
In the Cut
New York is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978
In New York, we're out of road salt. So for the next big storm they have to use parmesan cheese.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, October 31, 2011
I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What I Saw in America
New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.
E. B. WHITE
Here is New York
Perhaps more than in any other city, a sense of nervy self-preservation is rife here: people make studied efforts to avoid eye contact, and any unusual behavior clears a space immediately: the atmosphere of impending violence is sometimes sniffable.
MARTIN DUNFORD & JACK HOLLAND
New York City
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
ANGELA CARTER
New Society