New York was New Year's Eve

"New York was wall-to-wall mile-high buildings. It was the opposite of dinky Santa Ana or even Los Angeles. It was Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the Chrysler Building too. But most of all it was New Year's Eve. It was hundreds of thousands —no, millions— of people gathered together to celebrate the ringing in of a new year."
Diane Keaton, Then Again

New York at Night

"New York at night is full of such beauty that if the only thing you had ever experienced was sailing into New York by night you would have gained an impression you would not forget as long as you live."
Fritz Lang, quoted in Metropolis

Number One

"In the pantheon of United States cities, New York is hands-down, flat-out, number one. Gotham. The enchilada. The straw that stirs the drink."
Jim Reisler, Babe Ruth Slept Here

Hive

"New York was a hive. You could not just live here. You had to be somebody, do something, it didn't matter what."
Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young

42nd Street

"Forty-second Street! The top of the world, they call it. Where's the bottom then? You can walk along with your hands out and they'll put cinders in your cap."
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Mad, Mad World

"It's a mad, mad world in Manhattan, where taxis, pedicabs, commuters, pedestrians --even horse-drawn carriages-- careen around looking for space. The city is heady, frustrating, shocking, almost overwhelming it its intensity and, ultimately, incredibly exhilarating."
Ginger Otis, Lonely Planet New York City Encounter (Best Of)

Miracle on 34th Street

"It's Miracle on 34th Street, not miracle on 134th Street. The only miracle on 134th Street is that we get to participate at all. Half the time Santa skips us on his way downtown, just like a taxicab."
Jessica Williams, The Daily Show

Christmas Carol

Christmas wreaths for sale on Sixth Avenue

"Only in New York is 'Shut the fuck up, some of us work in the morning' considered a Christmas carol."
Dennis Miller, I Rant, Therefore I Am

Rata-tat-tat

Eighth Avenue

"Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York."
Fritz Leiber, The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

Out-of-Towners

Entrance to the PATH train

"The problem with New York is not New Yorkers. It's the out-of-towners who move here and inflict out-of-town aggression."
Karen Siplin, Such a Girl

Skyline Dreams

"New York is like a boyfriend
One whose sweater I will keep
And every night when I put it on
Of the skyline I will dream."
Ashley Jones, New York is Like a Boyfriend

Unseen World

"There is no question there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?"
Woody Allen, quoted in Picturing New York

Family

"New York is one big family, and if you ain't part of the family you're no one."
Lauren O'Farrell, Stitch New York

Mecca for Masochists

"New York is a mecca for masochists. It is the Atlantis of our masochistic fantasies."
Gael Greene, Bite

Dream Machine

"I almost feel bad for people who are born and raised here because you’ll never understand how the outsider feels about New York City. People look at this place as a dream machine, as an opportunity to escape whatever their current reality is. They look at it like it’s magical."
Mallory Hagan, The New York Times

How a New Yorker Acts

West Chelsea

"Act like a New Yorker: a pushy obnoxious knock-the-other-guy-down-and-take-his-hot-dog resident of the greatest city on Earth."
Barney Stimpson (Neil Patrick Harris), How I Met Your Mother

Little Old New York

"It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York."
O. Henry, Whirligigs

Quicker Pace

"New Yorkers can't settle down anywhere else in the world because they just naturally have a quicker pace. You get out of the bed faster in New York."
Al Sharpton, quoted in New York Magazine

Thousands of Invisible Boundaries

"A city can be so isolating, almost as if the more different types of people there are crammed together in a small area, the farther away they all are from each other. New York is the same way -- a little island crisscrossed with thousands of invisible boundaries."
Anne Raeff, Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

Crowded

"New York is crowded. Other people always get in your way. You can't stretch your legs without kicking somebody and you can't think without static from 8 million other brains."
Robert Anasi, The Last Bohemia

City of Contradictions

"New York is the most glamorous city in the world, the most romantic, the noisiest, the dirtiest, the best, the worst, the most exciting, the most depressing. No two people have experienced the same New York twice."
Jonathan Scheff, New York City Icons: 50 Classic Slices of the Big Apple

Island on an Island

"Times Square, New York, is an electric island floating on a larger island of lonesome parks and lonesome apartment houses and knifepointed buildings stretching Up. (I will think dazedly one night: Someday this city will tear its wharf-lined fringes from the ocean and soar in desperation to the Sky.)"
John Rechy, City of Night

Death Sentence

Funeral home on Third Avenue

"That first week of winter wind in New York is a death sentence. You have appeals and reprieves, but nothing will get you through it but time."
Brendan Jay Sullivan, Rivington Was Ours

Fastest City

"I love New York. It's the hottest city going! I haven't been everywhere, but it's the fastest city on earth."
John Lennon, Lennon in America

New York Stereotypes

"You often see people move to New York and immediately start conforming to stereotype. The pressure, whether overtly felt or only dimly sensed, of being part of something as overwhelming as New York blows the mind of anyone who does not have a perfectly solid-state personality, which is to say most of us."
Roy Edroso, Burn magazine

Power and Roar

"New York turns its back on the Atlantic. The power and roar New York looks to are its own."
Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary

Psychoanalysis

"In New York everyone is on psychoanalysis and they never get anything done, they never get off it."
William S. Burroughs, Conversations with William S. Burroughs 

New York Attitude

"LA is the me city, Ruby said, and New York is the you city. In LA it's fuck me. In New York it's fuck you. Adopt the attitude. It's all in the face. Mostly in the eyes."
Tom Spanbauer, In the City of Shy Hunters

No Place I'd Rather Be

"New York, New York is everything they say
And no place that I'd rather be
Where else can you do a half a million things
And all at a quarter to three."
Huey Lewis and the News, The Heart Of Rock & Roll

Bigger, Better, Faster, More

"I had never seen any city like it, and I had never felt so small, but small in such a wonderful way. Small in a way that didn't feel bad, or lonely. Everything felt vital and important here. Bigger, better, faster, more. As if everyone were essential and functioning in a great big machine with lots of moving parts, and it really mattered that they were all here and going about their business exactly as they were doing. That was the moment I vowed that I'd move here one day, the moment New York wooed me."
Helen Wan, The Partner Track

The Motion of New York

"Some people wonder if all this motion really gets anywhere. The New Yorker's answer is that it doesn't have to; if you're in New York, you're already there."
Susanna Margolis and Marjorie Palmer, Secrets of New York City

Know Everybody

"Everybody in New York has always known everybody."
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Naked Cities

Naked Cowgirls in Times Square

"There are eight million naked cities in this naked city."
Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

Reason to Be Thankful

Photo: Patrick J. Cashin

"I wake up every morning and say to myself, 'Well, I'm still in New York. Thank you, God.'"
Ed Koch, Vanity Fair

People in New York

Little Italy

"People in New York are either New Yorkers, or they're Spanish, or Italian, or Irish, or whatever. Who the hell moves to Williamsburg and says, Hey, I'm an American?"
Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein

Zen Wisdom

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

"Any attempt to define New York today recalls the Zen wisdom that you can't step in the same stream twice. The city is so mutable, so constantly changing, that it's almost impossible to get a fix on it."
Cheryl Farr Leas, Frommer's New York City from $80 a Day 2000

Never Stops

"The amazing thing about New York is that it never really stops—it's always going, one way or the other."
Eric Bogosian, Perforated Heart

Disdain

"A New Yorker is someone that has general disdain toward landlords, mass-transit authorities, electric companies, sports-team managers, NYU and its students, and anything new. We also have some kind of back pain."
Ad-Rock, quoted in New York Magazine

Foreigners

East 41st St.

"New York also has its thousands of Real Folks, but New York is cursed with unnumbered foreigners."
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

Vibrant Pace

"When I think about arriving in New York City, I anticipate its vibrant and pulsating pace which creates passionate feelings inside me."
Elizabeth Taylor, New York Vertical

Manhattanization

The buildings that will replace 5 Pointz (Source: Inhabitat.com)

"All over the world, 'Manhattanization' signifies everything in a city that is thought not to be authentic: high-rise buildings that grow taller every year, dense crowds where no one knows your name, high prices for inferior living conditions, and intense competition to be in style."
Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places

Mammon

5 Pointz

"Mammon, n. The god of the world's leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York."
Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary

Music and Internal Engines

"The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines."
E.B. White, Here is New York

Victorian Novel

"New York was like a massive Victorian novel which forced you to work your way through its broad canvas and complicated subplots."
Douglas Kennedy, The Pursuit of Happiness