Going to Hell

Downing Street

"New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there."
Robert M. Pirsig, Lila an Inquiry Into Morals

A Sparkling Treasure

Times Square

"For the tourist, each moment in New York is, at least potentially, a sparkling treasure, an immensity of experience; for the New Yorker, there is a comforting mundanity to everyday life, a predictability and a delicious smallness."
Murray Pomerance,  City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination

Do Not Invade

U.S.S. Intrepid

"There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade."
Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) Casablanca, written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch.

How Funny You Are

Central Park

"How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left."
Frank O'Hara, "Steps," The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

Sense of Competition

"In New York, one's sense of competition had to be practical: there was always someone doing better than you, always."
Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty: A Novel

Heaven

Riverside Park South

"To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying."
P.G. Wodehouse, America, I like you

Capitalistic Capital

"New York is the democratic capitalistic capital of the world, and the most modern of cities."
Robert A.M. Stern, quoted in  New York: An Illustrated History

Prick Measuring

One57

"I hate New York. Every time you meet somebody, it's prick-measuring time. My success can pee farther than yours, nyah, nyah."
Marge Piercy, Longings of Women

Great Woman

Joan of Arc statue

"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, Woody Allen: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series)

Everyone is an Exile

90 St. - Elmhurst Av. station

"That unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography)

The Cold Wind Lives Here

"

"When the cold wind comes
It lives in New York City
And the street is no place to be
But there you are
So you try hard or you die hard."
James Brown,  Down And Out In New York City

Great Expectations

New York Times building and Midtown

"I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist.
And I'd turned out to be right."
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

Taxi Rules

Port Authority

"New York taxi rules:
1. Driver speaks no English.
2. Driver just got here two days ago from someplace like Senegal.
3. Driver hates you."
Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

The Bronx

Spuyten Duyvil

"The world is the Bronx, and the Bronx is the world."
Adam Mansbach, The End of the Jews: A Novel

Big Mouth

Firemen's Memorial, Riverside Park

"New York is the biggest mouth in the world.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (A Mentor Book)

Unimportance

Chrysler Building seen from Bowery

"New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance."
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Royal Celebration

Guggenheim Museum

"No city in the world draws more artists -- be they painters or writers, sculptors or musicians, poets or opera divas -- than New York. And if the place can be hard on them while they're alive, at least it celebrates them royally when they're dead, with a host of museums, galleries, concert halls, and enduring legends."
Brad Dunn and Daniel Hood, New York: The Unknown City

No Tradition

Columbia University

"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,  What I Saw in America

Upward and Outward

Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge

"New York loves expanse. It grows upward and spreads its tentacles outward, the island spilling into adjoining lands through its many bridges and tunnels."
Dalia Sofer, The Septembers of Shiraz

The Loftiest of Cities

Empire State Building

"New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression."

E.B. White, Here is New York

Cash-Sucking Vortex

Elizabeth Street

"The city is a cash-sucking vortex; a scavenger metropolis."
Warren Leight, The I Hate New York Guidebook (Coronet Books)

Shut-In

Ryders Alley

"I hate New York. It is always noisy, everything is somber, shut-in, severe."
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

The Outer Boroughs

Manhattan Bridge

"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."
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

The Real New York Marathon

"The real New York Marathon: The inspiring, embarrassing, and sometimes debilitating things you must endure in order to live and love in Manhattan."
Cindy Chupack, The Between Boyfriends Book: A Collection of Cautiously Hopeful Essays

Bustle, Dissension and Expectancy

"New York is like a big, noisy family getting ready to move to another town -- there's that same atmosphere of bustle and good-natured dissension and expectancy."
Anton Myrer, The Last Convertible