50 Greatest Quotes About New York City

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 beauty in the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald

I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question. Dylan Thomas

Give me such shows — give me the streets of Manhattan! Walt Whitman

New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American. Djuna Barnes

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

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

I love New York City. The reason I live in New York City is because it’s the loudest city on the planet Earth. It’s so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that’s going on in my own head. It’s really loud. They literally have guys come with jackhammers and they drill the streets and just leave cones in front of your apartment; you don’t even know why. Garbage men come; they don’t pick up the garbage, they just bang the cans together. Lewis Black

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

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal. Kurt Vonnegut

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book — and does. Groucho Marx

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

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do. Walter Kirn

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

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

Make your mark in New York and you are a made man. Mark Twain

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. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. James Baldwin

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual. Angela Carter

The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remark ably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City…. It is not supposed to have existed. George Chauncey

New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty! Salvador Dalí

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. Joan Didion

New York is a sucked orange. Ralph Waldo Emerson

New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabilizer…. In New York I h ave always felt lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which brings on crime, sex, alcohol and other madnesses. Henry Miller

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there…. Squares af ter squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. Ezra Pound

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. Simone Beauvoir

In New York you’ve got to have all the luck. Charles Bukowski

Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place. Johnny Carson

I love New York City; I’ve got a gun. Charles Barkley

There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die. Walt Whitman

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. Le Corbusier

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life. Irving Berlin

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough. Fran Lebowitz

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange. Karl Lagerfeld

In terms of theater, there’s not a more supportive theater community than in New York. It’s really kind of a real thrill to go there. I mean, don’t forget, I’m a boy from the suburbs of Sydney, so getting to New York is a huge, huge thrill. Hugh Jackman

I came to New York to be a fine artist — that was my ambition. David Byrne

The glamour of it all! New York! America! Charlie Chaplin

I get out of the taxi and it’s probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York. Milos Forman

I was a girly-girl until I moved to New York. Then I got really into the androgynous look of the early-’90s club scene. I had really short hair and started blurring the line a bit. But for me, grade school was about Benetton, Esprit, and Guess jeans. Chloë Sevigny

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed… a race for rent. Frank Lloyd Wright

I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, “There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.” Robert De Niro

Most of my friends in New York are single women or gay men. Sarah Jessica Parker

One of the big things I miss about New York is not my friends so much; it’s Shake Shack, the burger place. I miss Shake Shack. Aziz Ansari

One’s life and passion may be elsewhere, but New York is where you prove if what you think in theory makes sense in life. Miuccia Prada

People in New York love having roof parties. Todd Barry

There’s something so romantic about being broke in New York. You gotta do it. You have to live there once without any money, and then you have to live there when you have money. Let me tell you, of the two, the latter is far better. Amy Poehler

But if I had to choose a single destination where I’d be held captive for the rest of my time in New York, I’d choose the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tim Gunn

My favorite thing about New York is the people, because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are. Bill Murray

When I’m in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing, like I’m in a movie. Ryan Adams

New York ladies all look immaculate. Zac Posen

I didn’t know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited. Greta Gerwig

I can’t with any conscience argue for New York with anyone. It’s like Calcutta. But I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they’re a drunk or a thief. I’ve loved the city my whole life — to me, it’s like a great woman. Woody Allen