Present Tense

West 14th

"He is a natural New Yorker, a native of the present tense."
V.S. Pritchett, New York Proclaimed

The Right to Become a New Yorker

Dumbo

"I myself have the right to become a New Yorker, if I am strong enough to cut a furrow in New York. I should not thereby become an American."
Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White

Spit

"I love New York. It's the only place where if you look at anyone long enough, they'll eventually spit."
Caroline Rhea, That’s Really Funny

New York Kids

School buses on Fifth Avenue

"New York kids, from penthouse to welfare hotel, from shtetl to ghetto, are little shock troops of contemporary urban life, taking for granted the extremes of the city into which they are born and dramatizing those extremes with their unquestioning adaptation."
Michele Landsberg, This is New York, Honey

Hubris

Trump Tower

"New York is our national endorsement for ego, hubris, for fully licensed, cross-promotional insanity."
Douglas McDaniel, William Blake in Cyberspace

Lab

"New York City is like a lab where there is constant testing and experimenting, enforcing the possibilities of humanity."
Rubén Blades, New York Magazine

Lay it on the Line

Store on Fifth Avenue

"New Yorkers don't hold anything back—sitting in traffic or just walking down the street, we lay it on the line, and we don't whisper when we do it."
John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious

Friendship in Distress

Herald Square

"New Yorkers are famous for minding their own business, but deep down they know that neither personal nor collective urban survival is possible without some form of friendship-in-distress."
Donald W Shriver, On Second Thought

Sharp Edges

East 42nd

"New York is not about being well rounded. It's all sharp edges."
Amy Gray, Spygirl

Pretense

Fifth Avenue

"The only way to live in New York is to pretend it's someplace else. There are whole blocks filled with New Yorkers who believe they’re living in Montmartre, apartment buildings that belong properly to Bloomsbury, and even a street or two that reside, imaginatively, in the New York of 1945."
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Bad to Cute

Williamsburg Landing

"That's another reason I love New York. Just like that, it can go from bad to cute."
Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Sex and the City

In the Midst of Life

Brooklyn Borough Hall

"In the midst of life we are in Brooklyn."
Oliver Herford, quoted in The City

Direct and Impatient

East 55th

"There’s the common characteristic of being direct. Also impatient. That’s a fundamentally New York trait. Nothing happens fast enough."
Julia Stiles, New York Magazine

City of Fire

"When night comes, a fantastic magic city, all of fire, suddenly blazes up from the ocean. Without consuming, it burns long against the dark background of the sky, its beauty mirrored in the broad, gleaming bosom of the sea."
Maxim Gorky, Writing New York

Scary

Soho

"Of course New York is scary. Would anyone want to come here if it weren't intimidating?"
Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know

What the World Thinks

The New York Times Building

"New York is essentially responsible for what the rest of the country thinks — and for what the world thinks about America."
Jamake Highwater, New York Magazine

Seize the Moment

Bike in Prospect Park

"That's what I love about New York. It teaches you to live life the way it should be lived — moment to moment. Because every moment in New York could be your last. Every half moment could be your last half moment."
Denis Leary, No Cure for Cancer

Apartment Slaves

Dumbo

"New Yorkers are now slaves to their apartments, obsessed with where they dwell. For everyone in this city knows that an apartment is everything. To be dislodged for whatever reason is to be thrown over the brink into an abyss of terror and unremitting uncertainty."
Herbert London, The Broken Apple

Lesson

East 14th St.

"I spent my childhood in New York, riding the subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you're a New Yorker? The world doesn't owe you a damn thing."
Lauren Bacall, quoted in The New York Times

Egotistic

Madison Avenue

"New York is a tough place, there aren’t so many pleasures. It’s expensive: very few people have trees in their backyard, like I do here, so your ego gets stuck in egotistic things."
Charlemagne Palestine, The Wire

Struck

Jacob K. Javits Convention Center

"No matter how many times I visit this great city I'm always struck by the same thing: a yellow taxi cab."
Scott Adams, The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom

Dog Days

Hillside Dog Park

"When it's hot, New Yorkers get hot under the collar. What pisses us off the most is being robbed of our urban cool. Step out of doors on any Manhattan dog day and no matter who or what you are, everything crisp and businesslike about you soon becomes damp, limp and clingy."
Lee Stringer, Grand Central Winter

Five Feet

Brooklyn Bridge Park

"To be a New Yorker meant you gave everybody five feet. You gave everybody their privacy."
Alec Baldwin, New York Magazine

Commandments

Herald Square

"New York is so full of opportunities that there are not enough commandments to break."
P.F. Murphy, New York Athletic Club Journal

No Good-Breeding

East 17th Street

"With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good-breeding to be found. We have been treated with an assiduous respect but I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town. At their entertainments there is no conversation that is agreeable; there is no modesty, no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether."
John Adams, The Works of John Adams

Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk

"The term New Yorker is as much a verb as a noun. Unlike most places that demand a certain elapsed time period before one is considered a native, New York is democratic. If you can talk the talk and walk the walk, you are a New Yorker."
Kenneth T. Jackson and David Dunbar, Empire City

Like Being in a Movie

"I love that about New York: all the great Woody Allen scenes you can pretend you are part of."
Alison Pace, Pug Hill

Cruel and Unusual

"August in New York is cruel and unusual punishment."
John Olson, Souls of Wind

Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

"The firmament that is New York is greater than the sum of its constituent parts. It is a city and it is also a creature, a mentality, a disease, a threat, an electromagnet, a cheap stage set, an accident corridor. It is an implausible character, a monstrous vortex of contradictions, an attraction-repulsion mechanism so extreme no one could have made it up."
Luc Sante, Low Life

City of the Mind

Columbia University

"For the rest of the country New York is now largely a city of the mind — at best, a site for the voodoo transformation of image into flesh."
Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

Get the Hell Out

Third Avenue

"No sooner did I get to New York than I was informed that the only thing 'real' New Yorkers want to do in the summer is get the hell out of New York."
Kenneth M. Walsh, Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?