Pain in the Neck

Billboard in Times Square

"New Yorkers are a pain in the neck. Always thinking about money."
Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane

Dying in Manhattan

Trinity Church Cemetery & Mausoleum

"If I'm going to die, I want to die in Manhattan."
Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), Mad Men

The Perfect Place to Lose Yourself

The Lake

"New York City is the perfect place to lose yourself for a while — permanently, if you want to."
Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

Will Go On

Pier 54

"Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us."
Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

Depends on Immigration

The Immigrants statue

"The fact is that America depends on New York and New York depends on immigration."
Rudolph Giuliani, The Quotable Giuliani

Sesame Street

Times Square

"I always imagined that New York felt like Sesame Street. The urban decay. The community aspect. The multiracial thing."
Jeff Whitty, Avenue Q: The Book

A Monument of Splendor

Manhattan seen from Roosevelt Island

"The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach."
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Melting Pot?

Surf Avenue

"Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums."
John Kenneth Galbraith,  A View from the Stands

Empire City

Empire State Building

"Everyone who lives here thinks the city is such hot shit. New York just sucks you in with all its coolness. But the Empire City has no clothes. It was buzz, spin, and hype without any substance."
Arthur Nersesian, Dogrun

Big Men with Little Soul

Riverside South

"New Yorkers are prone to boast of their superiority over the denizens of other cities, but it is a fact that the American metropolis is inferior in culture, intelligence and morals to almost any city in the world. It is the home of big men with little soul, big newspapers with little editors."
Henry O. Morris, Waiting for the Signal

Jostling for Space

96th Street Station

"New Yorkers are so accustomed to subways and elevators, fighting to get a seat and jostling for space, that it's a hard habit to break. They come skiing in Vermont and spend all day charging lifts."
John Hilferty, Moonlight in Vermont

Cosmopolitan

"New York is a cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans."
G.K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed and Other Essays

The Story of the World

Statue of Liberty

"To Europe she was America, to America she was the gateway of the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world."
H.G. Wells, The War in the Air

A New Yorker Who Doesn't Take the Subway

Union Square subway station

"A New Yorker who does not take the subway is not a New Yorker you can trust."
Mozzie (Willie Garson), White Collar

The City That Never Lets You Sleep

Lexington Avenue

"It's so loud. All the time. Yes, it's the city that never sleeps. Well, guess what? I like to sleep! I've been tired for eight years!"
Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), How I Met Your Mother

Too Good for New Yorkers

Fifth Avenue

"New York is much too good for New Yorkers"
Heywood Broun,  Empire City

No Local Pride

"There is this to be said for New York City: it is the one densely inhabited locality -- with the possible exception of Hell -- that has absolutely not a trace of local pride."
Irving S. Cobb, New York

The Fantasy of a Mechanical God

Harlem

"New York is unreal. A simple tree is more real than it.
It is the fantasy of a mechanical God.
New York is a monster furiously disemboweled by men like maggots.
Had religion given rise to it, what would we sincerely think of this religion?"
Jean Toomer, A Jean Toomer Reader

New York Is a Drug

East 6th

"New York is cocaine, opium, hashish."
Ambrose Bierce, A Much Misunderstood Man

Hurry and Flurry

"Many years ago I learned to discount the hurry and flurry of New York. We are no busier than Bridgeport or Jersey City, but we pretend we are. It is necessary for our municipal vanity to squeeze and jam and rush and crush."
James Huneker,  New Cosmopolis

Central Park

Central Park

"Manhattan is a city without trees, but there is a ghetto for them: Central Park."
Raymond-Léopold Bruckberger, One Sky To Share

Great Achievement

East River Park

"New York is one of man's greatest achievements."
Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City

The Destinies of the Nation

Fraunces Tavern

"The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation than five times the population of any other portion of the country. "
Willis A. Gorman, quoted in The New Metropolis

The Composition of a Mad Artist

Lower East Side

"A collage of disparate, violently-yoked-together elements, New York was the surreal composition of a mad artist."
E.L. Doctorow, Creationists

The Most Wonderful Street

Broadway

"The most wonderful street in the Universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself."
James Dabney McCabe,  Lights and Shadows of New York Life

Where Talent Flowers

The Juilliard School

"If the talent of America is not born here,  it usually flowers here, for this is the stimulus, the forcing ground, and the marketplace."
Marya Mannes, The New York I Know

Technicholor Bazaar

Flower District

"Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar."
Kenneth Tynan, Tynan Right and Left

Rosetta Stone

Sidewalk Art by Keith Haring (Prince and Broadway)

"Manhattan is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone."
Rem Koolhaas,  Delirious New York

Street Challenge

Broome St.

"In New York, constantly, the street is challenging you to relate to it."
Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stone Interviews

Money Talks

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

"In New York, boy, money really talks — I'm not kidding."
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

New Year's Day

42nd Street Subway Station

"New Year's Day in New York is not the less one of the cheerfullest and most humanising celebrations extant among a noble, but perverse people, who have repudiated the greater part of the traditional observances to which Europeans pin a reverent and affectionate faith.  I wish --abating the plethoric eating and drinking-- that it were always New Year's Day in New York, and in the whole of this magnificent empire of Democracy turned crazy."
George Augustus Henry Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of War