Journalism

The New York Times building

"New York, the Jerusalem of Journalism."
Jim Bishop, quoted in The City

Wisdom of the Lowly

Brooklyn Heights

"There is no hope for New Yorkers, for they glory in their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly."
Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels

Subway Service

69 Street - Fisk Avenue subway station

"The best thing about New York is the wonderful subway service. Where else, for less than a dollar, can you smell the fruit-bowl bouquet of human excreta?"
Howard Stern, New York Magazine

End of the World

Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

"People in London think of London as the center of the world, whereas New Yorkers think the world ends three miles outside of Manhattan."
Toby Young, quoted in The Wit & Wisdom of London

Anything is Possible

Downtown Manhattan Heliport

"This is New York City. If you've got the money, anything's possible."
Sheldon Hawkes (Hill Harper), CSI NY

Spill Your Guts

Central Park Tennis Center

"New Yorkers love it when you spill your guts out there. You spill your guts at Wimbledon, they make you stop and clean it up."
John McEnroe, quoted in The 100 Greatest Days in New York Sports

Yaptown

East 51st

"If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York."
O. Henry, The Gentle Grafter

What New Yorkers Do

Sixth Avenue

"That's what New Yorkers do. They read about other New Yorkers."
Ned Zeman, Vanity Fair

Mirage

Delacorte Theater

"For too many people, women especially, New York is a mirage, a city that thrives on its capacity to dazzle and beckon in spite of the harshness that everyone eventually discovers, beneath the glimmer, like a dead rat in the flower beds of Park Avenue."
Matthew DeBord, The New York Observer

Nosy New Yorkers

East 51st Street

"New Yorkers are nosier than Californians for some reason, probably because they're used to living in closer quarters with more people underfoot in a world of terrifying anonymity, so when they sink their teeth into someone for questioning they go all the way to the bone."
Danielle Steel, Going Home

Garbage Can

Garbage cans on Canal St.

"New York is no place for a civilized man. Nothing good has ever come out of it, and nothing good ever will come out of it. It degrades, it vulgarizes, it dehydrates, it demolishes, it belittles—it is a sewer, a cesspool, a garbage can."
H.L. Mencken, quoted in Articulating Biographical Sketches of Diminutive Luminaries

Extraordinary

Carl Schurz monument

"Everybody in New York is extraordinary; if people are artists or actors or colossal millionaires or abject paupers or mighty editors or fearless gunmen or anything amazingly unusual, they at once become part of the metropolis."
Maurice Francis Egan, "Loaf, and Invite Your Soul," The Bookman

Interest

Museum of the City of New York

"New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York—in case you haven't noticed."
Jim Harrison, The Morning News

The Meek

East 10th

“In New York City, the meek don't inherit the earth. The big mouth does.”
Barbara Corcoran,  Forbes

Leaving the Nest

Bird bath in the Conservatory Garden

"New York means so much to people. If you're inclined to leave the nest, New York is where most people think they have to go, and it's been that way since the first skyscraper."
Griffin Dunne, Indie Wire

Better Looking

Central Park

"I get out of the taxi and it's probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York."
Milos Forman, The National Security Archive

Charcoal Heart

Chelsea Market

"New York is America's charcoal heart. New York burns out all the extra stuff in your life. You have to be able to state what you want and why you want it as precisely and concisely as possibly. There's no time for anything else."
Tom Spanbauer, In the City of Shy Hunters

Own Meaning

Strand Book Store

"Each man reads his own meaning into New York."
Meyer Berger, The Empire City

Connections

Herald Square

"I bet if you looked hard enough you'd find a connection between everybody in this city. I mean, that's the great thing about New York."
Martha Rodgers (Susan Sullivan), Castle

Out of the Underworld

Park Avenue Tunnel

"I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping along behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny."
Rick Riordan, Last Olympian

Detour

Extra Place

"In New York every step is a detour in every direction."
Jason Schwartzman, Gothamist

The Ways of New York

Peter Stuyvesant statue

"New York is of in four ways:
It is the New York of 1622, with the Indians around, and its shape then:
which it still has.
It is the New York of Peter Stuyvesant.
It is the New York of James J. Walker.
It is the New York or someone who came here from New Jersey this morning
and left this afternoon."
Eli Siegel, New York Is, In More Than One Way

For the Sake of the Apartment

901 Broadway

"In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment."
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Be and Do Everything

9 West 10th

"New York City [is] the only place where people with nothing behind them but their wits can be and do everything."

Dawn Powell, Remarkable, Unspeakable New York

Puree

Mari Vanna restaurant

"It was a place that tolerated differences and could incorporate them and embrace them, which was what America was supposed to be about and wasn't. So it was the melting pot that was a puree rather than individual vegetables. I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup."
Spalding Gray, quoted on PBS

Baseless Optimism

The Mall

"Manhattan Island, at its center, inspires utterly baseless optimism — even in me, even in drunks sleeping in doorways and in little old ladies whose houses are shopping bags."
Kurt Vonnegut, quoted in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning

Unflappable

West 14th

"New Yorkers love the fable of their own imperturbability, to boast of how unflappable they remain whether confronted with a rooster that has gotten loose in the subway or a prime minister crossing Lexington Avenue."
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes

Comma

Third Avenue

"I'll tell ya, in New York City, where I've lived far too long, 'fuck' isn't even a word, it's a comma."
Lewis Black, The White Album

Mighty Fine

Central Park West

"New York is a mighty fine place if you get 'in right.' Of course, if you don't, it's h-e-l-l."
David Graham Phillips, The Price She Paid

Six Months

Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge

"You don't have to be born in New York City to be a New Yorker. You have to live here for six months. And if at the end of the six months you walk faster, you talk faster, you think faster, you're a New Yorker."
Ed Koch, The Local East Village

Playground

Chelsea Piers

"You'll love living in New York.  It's a pain in the ass if you don't have any money, but if you have some dough, it's the biggest and best playground in the world."
Douglas Brunt, Ghosts of Manhattan