Finger in the Socket

West 14th

"Living in New York is like living with your finger in the socket."
Sandy Walker, Creativity for Life

Poetry

"Seiren" on Riverside Park South

"The poetry of New York is not pseudo-poetry; it is true poetry. The poetry of New York is not mechanical rhythm; the poetry of New York is the lions' roar that awakened me the first morning."
Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

Park Avenue

Park Avenue

"Park Avenue is a high gray corridor, a bastion of taste and stillness, an immaculate granite canyon where the garbage is sequestered in basement grottoes and whisked away in the dead of night, as if it had never existed; Hitchcock garbage."
Paul Rudnick, Social Disease

Manhattan vs. Brooklyn

Manhattan skyline seen from Brooklyn Heights

"Manhattan is the tower, Brooklyn the garden. Manhattan is Faustian will, Brooklyn is domestic life. Manhattan preens, disseminates opinions; Brooklyn is Uncle Vanya schlepping in the background to support his peacock relative."
Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz, Brooklyn: A State of Mind

Money and Culture

Metropolitan Museum of Art

"New York is the showy one, flashy one. It's not the official capital, but it's the capital as the important things are concerned money and culture. Swagger, noise, lights and freedom."
Gbontwi Anyetei, What Do You Call It?

The Old New York

Riverside Drive

"Other cities always make me mad
Other places always make me sad
No other city ever made me glad except New York, New York
It’s the old New York."
Cast of Glee, Glee

The Sum of All Disappointments

Sign on the East Village

"For so many, New York was ultimately the sum of what they would never attain."
Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

Really New

New Street

"The 'New' in 'New York' is real; like a giant machine, the city creates the newest songs, books, fashions, ideas, slang, monsters, and master-minds that will be tomorrow's news in Halifax or Hong Kong."
Michele Landsberg, This is New York, Honey!

Comedy and Tragedy

Eleven Times Square

"Shouldn't we all try to be more mindful of others' struggles? Especially in New York City, in which mythic comedies and epic tragedies can be witnessed on a single street corner while impatiently waiting for the right moment to jump the go signal and jaywalk to the other side?"
Megan McCafferty, Fourth Comings

The Urban Center

Rockefeller Center

"New York is not simply the urban center of the United States; it is the urban center of the entire world, and more than that, it is the factor that defines the art, literature and music of America."
Howard Fast, War and Peace

How New York Makes You Feel

Lincoln Center

"There's nothing like New York City to make you feel small—or a part of something enormous and splendid, whichever you prefer."
Vicki Myron, Dewey's Nine Lives

No Escape from Money

Columbia University subway station

"In New York there is no escape from money. There are prices everywhere, no end of costs to meet or flee."
Eliot Schrefer, Glamorous Disasters

Caffeinated and Frazzled

Starbucks in the Financial District

"I was caffeinated and frazzled and worried about money, and, like most everyone else in New York, I accepted that as normal."
Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life

Great Secret

Riverside Park

"New York is a great secret, not only to those who have never seen it, but to the majority of its own citizens. Few living in the great city have any idea of the terrible romance and the hard reality of the lives of two thirds of the inhabitants."
James Dabney McCabe, The Secrets of the Great City

If I Can't Make it There...

Times Square

"I'm gonna audition for a Broadway play, because if I can't make it there, I can't make it anyplace."
Jack McFarland, Will & Grace

Narcissist Central

Flatiron Building and Madison Square Park

"New York is the kind of place where everyone gets to be a narcissist."
Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott, Which Brings Me to You

New York Children

School bus

"New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment."

Ernest Gruening, These United States

Alarm Bell

Hearst Tower

"New York is the stress capital of the globe, the alarm bell that says: This is the edge of humanity, the precipice beyond which no civilization may go."
William Raldoph Hearst Jr., The Hearsts: Father and Son

Deep Pockets

Sutton Square

"To live in New York, one had to have very deep pockets."
Tonya Lewis Lee and Crystal McCrary Anthony, Gotham Diaries

Alluring Skyline

Manhattan Skyline

"He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional."
Arthur Phillips, The Song is You

The Big Apple

JFK Airport

"New York is certainly an apple in the biblical sense — a mecca of forbidden fruits, lust, and temptation. The apple brought sin to man; New York is full of sinfully luscious pleasures swinging ripe and juicy from the tree, waiting to be plucked and eaten."
Bunny Crumpacker, The Sex Life of Food

The Hudson Divide

Hudson River

"People west of the Hudson resist the notion that what happens in New York City is relevant elsewhere in the country. Similarly, New Yorkers resist the notion that anything that happens west of the Hudson is relevant to them."
Roberta Brandes Gratz and Norman Mintz, Cities Back from the Edge

New York Night

Union Square West

"You never know what you're going to find when you go out at night in New York. You don't know if you'll find love, danger, happiness, or hell. You don't even know if you'll find a cab. But you're ready to take your chances. That's why you live in New York."
Kinky Friedman, The Mile High Club 

Right Angles

590 Madison Avenue

"The city of right angles and tough, damaged people."
Pete Hamill, quoted in The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom

Army and War

World War 2 Memorial

"New York City is like the war. NYC is like the army. Darkness and tedium. Hurry-up and wait. Huddled masses of humiliated men rushing about in gloom and damp and discomfort, burdened with worries, briefcases in hand, the automatic newspaper to shut out the faces, the horrible suffering faces of their neighbors."
Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian

Kansas and Oz

West End Avenue

"New York is both Kansas and Oz, dahling, both black-and-white and technicolor, with wicked witches on both sides of town, and good ones too."
James McCourt, Queer Street

Poverty into Art

Midtown Manhattan

"In today's age of gentrification, that period in NYC history is lost. But there was a time when we took all that neglect, crime, and poverty and turned it into art."
Ernesto Quiñonez, Lit Riffs

Patriotic

Fire hydrant in Midtown

"New York is a great city, too great for envy; New York is a powerful city, too powerful for boasting; New York is a generous city, too generous to feel the need to extol the art of giving; New York is a patriotic city, too patriotic to be satisfied with service of the lips."
Nicholas Murray Butler, American Patriotic Prose

New York Men

West 40th

"In New York City where I live, it is fashionable for women to complain that there are no available men, and as the slaves to fashion that they are, they do complain. I've noticed that what they mean is that there are no available men with handsome faces and lean bodies within the age range of one to five years older than they are with an income significantly larger than their own."
Susan Cheever, Desire

New York in Literature

Book Culture

"New York is a city that is omnipresent in literature, so much so that if a catastrophe ever occurred one would be able to re-create its sidewalks, dance clubs, and subway stations, its love affairs and robberies, even the shadow projected by a restless fly on a rain-soaked umbrella, through what its inhabitants write about."
Ilan Stavans, On Borrowed Words

Love-Hate

Metropolitan Opera House

"There is a love-hate relationship between New York and the rest of the country, but New York is unarguably the city that sets the standards, the city in which all who have anything to do with the arts dream of working and succeeding."
Harold Schonberg, New York Times World of New York