Rich Parent

Ivanka Trump store in Trump Tower

"Living in New York is like having a parent who's rich but too severe: You have advantages, but you miss the tenderness."
Tim Paulson, Success Story

Stimulating

Kenmare Street

"New York is stimulating, its vibrations shake up my brain cells."
Angna Enters, Among the Daughters

Your Neighborhood

Hanover St.

"New York is never a megalopolis of however many millions; it's always just your neighborhood—the shoe repair guy, the carpenter, the grocer, the post office— like any small town in Texas, really."
Dan Rather, My First New York

Virus

Sign in Coney Island

"Being born in New York wasn't enough to make someone a true New Yorker; it was in the blood, like a hormone, or a virus."
Cristina Alger, The Darlings

Endless Labyrinth

Guggenheim Museum

"New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost not only in the city, but within himself as well."
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy 

Vertigo

Roosevelt Island Tram

"The New Yorker's panic-stricken need for accomplishment — the need to go up — is matched by a kind of vertigo that comes with being constantly aware of the distance below."
Thomas Beller, New York Times

Crash Course

East 24th Street

"For me, residing and working in New York City was like taking a crash course in living."
Jeanne Koelsch, Stumbling to the Stars

The Opposite of San Francisco

Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

"New York is, in many ways, the opposite of San Francisco. If San Franciscans live with the knowledge that their city may fall into ruin at any moment, New Yorkers live as if their buildings are impregnable, that the city will never fall, that it will prosper forever."
Nathaniel Rich, Mayor's Tongue

Nobody Notices Anything

East 16th

"That's Manhattan for you: nobody notices anything unless it affects them directly."
Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion), Castle

New York Walking

East 42nd

"New York walking is like broken-field running, only it's a whole field of running backs all trying to just barely avoid being stopped without actually running."
Roy Blount, Jr, Now, Where Were We?

Ex-New Yorkers

Midtown

"I'm like all ex-New Yorkers: I can't imagine what I was doing there."
Nikki Giovanni, Conversations with Nikki Giovanni 

Purest Distillation

Central Park and Central Park West

"The world is the same jungle all over, but New York is its purest distillation."
Lee Child, Gone Tomorrow 

The Present

The Clocktower Building

"I will say this for New York. New York is the present; New York is today."
Richard Lourie, Zero Gravity

A Matter of Taste

East 14th

"If you tell a New Yorker that his metropolis has filthy streets which are continually torn up, that it swarms with aliens, that it is heterogeneous and has no civic solidarity, he will frankly admit all this without resentment, adding only: 'Well, after all, the place suits me.'"
Harry Thurston Peck, The New Baedeker: Being Casual Notes of an Irresponsible Traveller

Uncivilized Center

"Happy!" shooting on Madison Square Park

"You see this one narrow island everywhere you go—in print ads, on television, on multiplex screens — the quintessential city: noisy and glamorous and dirty, a village packed tight with avant-garde toddlers, mentally unstable artists, businesslike Europeans, marginal actors, hopeful immigrants from Haiti and Ohio, drug dealers, cat collectors, the unapologetically successful and the walking wounded — one layer overlapping the other, the uncivilized center of the civilized world."
Alisa Sheckley, The Better to Hold You

Graveyard

East Coast Memorial

"New York City's like a graveyard
All the corpses like the way I play my guitar
You've gotta be cute if you wanna get far
New York City's like a graveyard."
The Moldy Peaches, NYC's Like a Graveyard

V.I.P.

Madison Square Park

"Everyone in New York knows that he is an important person living among other important persons."
Brendan Behan, The Fabulous Country: An Anthology

Going Places

Riverside Park South

"Because strangers only see New Yorkers in transit, they leave with the impression that the city is one great mindless rush to nowhere. They complain that it's moving too fast, but they don't notice that it's getting there first. For better and for worse, New York has been where the rest of the country is going."
Andy Rooney, Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

Full of Hope

Literary Walk

"There was something about New York that was unlike any place he'd ever seen, something enormous and vital and — there was no use denying it — full of hope."
Paula Reibel, Morning Moon

World Compressed

Globe at Trump International Hotel and Tower

"New York is not a city. New York is the whole world compressed, and everything means everything, good and bad and in between, and too much of it and all at the same time."
Benedict Kealy, Waves Behind Us

Hate at First Sight

"Betten 2012" by Jordan Betten

"New York is a city that one hates at first sight and slowly learns to respect, and finally to admire."
Yaron Svoray, Gods of Death

Brain Center

Columbia University

"I think New York is the greatest brain center in the world or in the history of the world."
Gilbert Millstein, New York: True North

Capital of the Jews

Celebrate Israel Parade

"New York, the Capital of the Jews."
Calvin Trillin, Messages From My Father

Egotist

Museum of the City of New York

"New York is an egotist. It will suffer no divided attention."
P.G. Wodehouse, The Prince and Betty

Greatest Phenomenon

Roosevelt Island and Queens

"New York is the greatest phenomenon of the twentieth century."
Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriel García Márquez

Good English

William Shakespeare statue

"A person who speaks good English in New York sounds like a foreigner."
Jackie Mason, quoted in New York: Capital of Photography

Greedy for Life

Bowery

"If you are greedy for life, that's what New York is all about. If you're trying to get as much as you can every day, this city is the place to be."
Pam Nelson, My City, My New York

Detective Story

Riverside Park

"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."
Agatha Christie, quoted in Constellations of Reading

Not for the Faint of Heart

"Alamo" by Tony Rosenthal

"New York is a tough place for the faint of heart; the city has a way of forcing you to be razor sharp in every way."
Nina Garcia, The Style Strategy

Slightly Crazy

West 13th 

"It's good we're here in New York. We don't know many people. And in this city, everyone's slightly crazy anyway. That's what I love about this place. I feel freer in this city than anywhere else I've ever been."
Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck, The Dressmaker

Bull's-Eye

"Charging Bull" by Arturo Di Modica

"New York feels like a bull's-eye."
Andy Summers, One Train Later