What New Yorkers Don't Tolerate

Jefferson Market Library

"The last thing you want anybody in New York to think is that you've got time in your hands. Blood on your hands, people can learn to accept. Time on your hands, forget it."
Kinky Friedman, Spanking Watson

Several Cities

Police Building and New York by Gehry

"New York can be beautiful, eh? It's London and Paris and San Francisco all in one."
Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane

Mongers and Merchants

Pulitzer Fountain

"New York New York, capital of literature, the arts, social pretension, subway tunnel condos. Napoleonic real estate mongers, grandiose rag merchants. Self-important sportswriters."
E.L. Doctorow, City of God

Negativisms of Capitalism

Occupy Wall Street posters on the West Village

"New York is hell. It is the place where all the negativisms of capitalism converge and blossom."
Doreatha D. Mbalia, Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness

All Characters

Lafayette Street

"I don't think New York is like other cities. It does not have character like Los Angeles or New Orleans. It is all characters -- in fact, it is everything. It can destroy a man, but if his eyes are open it cannot bore him."
John Steinbeck, Of Men and Their Making

Thinking About Money

Morgan Stanley

"It was more difficult to work in New York and not think about money than it was not to think about sex or food."
Judith Krantz, I'll Take Manhattan

Getting Something Done

The High Line

"I don't know which is harder: to solve global warming or to get something done in New York City."
Joel Sternfeld, quoted by Tatum Taylor

To Save the Planet

One Centre St.

"If you want to save the planet, move to New York."
Janette Sadik-Khan, quoted in Treehugger

Too Many Choices

Maritime Hotel

"In New York freedom looks like too many choices
In New York I found a friend to drown out the other voices
Voices on the cell phone
Voices from home
Voices of the hard sell
Voices down the stairwell
In New York, just got a place in New York."
U2, New York

The World Outside New York

Roosevelt Island

"New Yorkers, myself included, famously forget there's a world out there."
Thomas Oliphant, Praying for Gil Hodges

Where Dreams Come True

"The place: New York City. The time: Now, 1962. And there's no time or place like it. If you've got a dream, this is the place to make that dream come true. That's why the soaring population of hopeful dreamers has just reached eight million people. Oh! Make that eight million and one."
Narrator, Down with Love

From Lavish to Desolate

East Houston

"In no other city in the country did the lives of rich and poor intersect more than New York. There were pockets of the city where one faction had completely taken over --Park Avenue for the rich, East New York for the poor-- but in large swaths of the city you had only to walk a few blocks to go from lavish to desolate and back again."
Justin Peacock, Blind Man's Alley

A Very Queer Place

Manhattan (Schuyler Shepherd / Wikimedia Commons)

"New York is a very queer place. All the old teachings of conservatism, the 'systems' of the old world, fall to the ground there. We find variety and pleasure in being rich to-day and poor to-morrow; we make a fortune in a day and spend it in a week, and our business principles do not savor of great nicety, or of what the old world calls ‘strict honesty.' Smartness is our watchword."

Monk, Going And Son

Where the Action Was

"To be in Manhattan was significant. That's where the action was. "
Nathan Glazer, Arguing the World

Destroying the Old

57th Street

"Manhattan was, we can safely say, the proving ground for the American penchant for destroying the old."
Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 

Dirty Place

West 28th

"She did not realize that New York City was such a dirty place, nor that it had so many strange, dirty, disturbing types of people. If it was such a great city, why did these conditions exist?"
Anthony Frisella, Golden Throat

Jagged Teeth

Downtown seen from the Brooklyn Bridge

"Manhattan was a jaw with jagged teeth."
Emily Raboteau, The Professor's Daughter

Live and Let Live

One Bryant Park

"It's a cliché that Manhattan's live-and-let-live attitude countenances the most unspeakable crimes. What everybody forgets is that in Manhattan, one is also sometimes left alone in public to do the right thing. Which almost never happens in small towns."
Benjamin Cheever, Famous After Death

Glittering Canyons

"The buildings are glittering canyons. They seem too bright to be true, like someone cleans the whole city every night, right up to the rooftops. I know that's probably not how you think of New York but it's how I see it."
Ethan Canin, For Kings and Planets

Unreachable City

The Sphere in Battery Park

"New York City was an island unreachable by most people in America, and somehow even the taint of horror and fear that had fallen over it in 2001 had given it a dented, temporary quality that made it seem even more valuable, in the way that fragility always increases the value of a thing of beauty."
Meg Wolitzer, The Ten-Year Nap

A Dump

West 25th St.

"New York is a mess! Why should it matter if I spill anything inside? The whole city is a dump!
Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli

America Without New York

East Coast Memorial

"The American people, of course, could go on living without New York, but they could not go on living as a great and puissant nation."
H.L. Mencken, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy

Magical New York Fashion Week

"Aaah, New York Fashion Week. That magical time twice a year when hundreds of journalists, buyers, boutique owners, and celebrities from around the world converge upon a small, citywide block to watch the latest collections. Five glorious days of champagne, air kisses and goodie bags!"
Melissa de la Cruz, Cat's Meow

Commerce and Joy

Macy's and Empire State Building

"New York was a capital of commerce and joy, and young people sought us from every direction. They came in droves, to join the kind of party that only a great metropolis can host."
Anna Godbersen, Bright Young Things

No Wimps and No Apologies

Atlas at Rockefeller Center

"It takes so much self-reliance to live among so many people, to push your way through crowds. Manhattan can act as a giant suction cup, sucking you into its folds. The city breeds no wimps and makes no apologies."
Kate Rockland, Falling Is Like This

Real Estate

Door on the Lower East Side

"People in New York are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into."
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland

Fiesta of Distraction

Bowery

"On the streets of New York one's visual sense was constantly assailed and tortured by a fiesta of distraction."
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

Feeling of Possibility

Brooklyn Bridge

"New York gave me a feeling of possibility I'd never gotten in the suburbs."
Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

New York Cares

Fashion Institute of Technology

"The best thing about New York is that the city itself cared about who you were and what you wore."
Lisa Gabriele, The Almost Archer Sisters

Riches of the Mind

Rose Main Reading Room

"New York was a dream. It was a dream of cosmopolitan riches of the mind."
Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan In His Own Words