New Yorker

"A New Yorker's name, face and accent change with each new tide of immigration, but he is always the same person—in a hurry."
The New York Times

Wasteland

North Williamsburg

"New York is a wasteland with a price tag for a soul."
Ben Hecht, quoted in The Billboard

New York Statement

Brooklyn Bridge

"The Brooklyn Bridge is so meaningful to me in so many ways. You get to the other side in Brooklyn and there's so much great food. But it's such a statement about what New York is. Gutsy hard work built that thing."
Rachael Ray, New York

Pointy Soul

East 42nd

"New York is a destination spot if your soul is too pointy and unwieldy to fit in your hometown, a place where you can let your freak flag, your ambition, your vestigial tail, and your terrible inability to ever shut up, really and truly fly."
Zachary Lipez, Vice

Intricate Web

34th Street subway station

"At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn't going to try."
Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume 1

Time Management

West 57th

"Etiquette in New York is all about time management. In other places, you seem rude if you see someone and don't talk to them long enough. But here, it's all about speed. And people are fine with that. It's like, 'Hello. It’s nice to see you. Thank you for giving me your kidney. I gotta go.'"
Amy Poehler, New York Magazine

Marvel

Manhattan skyline

"New York is simply a marvel! It is hard to believe it was build by humans, it appears like magic."
Frida Kalho, Frida Kahlo

Manhattan at Night

Midtown Manhattan

"Manhattan at night is among the most beautiful and dramatic spectacles on earth. Nothing I have ever seen in nature begins to match it, with the possible exception of the Grand Canyon."
August Kleinzahler, Cutty, One Rock

Beautiful Lady

East 13th

"My favorite city in the world is New York. Sure it's dirty—but like a beautiful lady smoking a cigar."
Joan Rivers, quoted in The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom

Noisyville-on-the-Subway

Central Park West

"Little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me."
O. Henry, Strictly Business

A Great Place to Live

Upper West Side

"New York is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there — the tourists jamming midtown have no idea how relatively gracious life can be on the Upper West Side."
Paul Krugman, The New York Times

New York Survey

"Interesting survey in the current Journal of Abnormal Psychology: New York City has a higher percentage of people you shouldn't make any sudden moves around than any other city in the world."
David Letterman, Late Night with David Letterman: The Book

The Middle of Nowhere

Dumbo

"He said to check out Brooklyn. But who wanted to go to Brooklyn? I didn't come all the way to New York City to live out in the middle of nowhere."
Stacy Wakefield, The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory

Manhattan Grid

"I love New York it's true America like Wyoming
is true west, only more so.
I love New York with its beautiful symmetry
of Manhattan street grids, the neat criss-cross of east and west
like threads in a fishnet stocking."
Tsaurah Litzky, Baby on the Water

Laboratory

Columbia University

"A new culture (the Machine Age?) selected Manhattan as a laboratory: a mythical island where the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire city became a factory of man-made experience, where the real and the natural ceased to exist."
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

Dancing

Dance Parade

"New Yorkers are always on their feet — racing along the sidewalks, crammed together in the subways, or trudging up a five-story walk-up — but it seems that everyone in New York dances in one way or another."
Rob Grader, The Cheap Bastard's Guide to New York City

Grey People

"In the glittering gossamer of its fantastic buildings, tens of thousands of gray people, like patches on the ragged clothes of a beggar, creep along with weary faces and colorless eyes."
Maxim Gorky, quoted in Major Problems in American Popular Culture

Stands Alone

Empire State Building

"First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among a half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized."
Malcolm Cowley, Think Back on Us

Biggest and Cruelest

Dumbo

"It is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest hour is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all."
Anna Godbersen, Beautiful Days

Adoptive City

"I love how New York adopts people. It’s a bit like London, actually. A bit of a cultural mosaic. Partly that's our history of trying to imperialize the entire world. But the whole thing about Ellis Island, people getting dropped off there and really, unless you're a dick, they'll go "Cool, glad you’re here!"
Matthew Goode, The New York Observer

Bethesda Fountain

"There's a spot in Central Park, the Bethesda Fountain, where if you sit there long enough, the entire city walks by."
Alex Whitman (Matthew Perry), Fools Rush In

Only Glory

Grand Central Terminal

"To step from a train platform into Grand Central's extraordinary concourse, one of the greatest interior spaces of the 20th century, is to feel in every fiber that you have arrived someplace important, to know that you have come into a great city and that that great city has greeted you properly. There may be disappointment ahead, but between the train track and the street there is only glory."
Paul Goldberger, The New York Times

Commercial

Flatiron Plaza

"New York is essentially the same now that it was then. The spirit of the place has not changed; it is as it was, splendidly and sordidly commercial."
William Dean Howells, The Complete Works of William Dean Howells 

Easy

Fifth Avenue

"New York is not a hard place to get around in. If you don’t know where you are, you don't deserve to be here."
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Heaped Horizons

"New York simply feels like the present: glittering, breathtaking, with its back to the past, its horizons heaped too high to see far."
Glyn Maxwell, The New York Times

New York Gossip

"There is really only one forum where the unique New York confluence of power, money, celebrity and controversy is dissected on a daily basis: the city's gossip columns. That's where the agenda is set."
Frank DiGiacomo, The Kingdom of New York

Celestial

View from the Top of the Rock

"Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial."
Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

Cesspool

Financial District

"I'm a westerner, New York is my natural enemy. Many a boy a lot purer than me had been corrupted by that stinking cesspool on the Hudson."
Ed Dinger, A Prince at First

Limitless

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir

"You are pure potential in Manhattan, limitless, you are making yourself every day."
Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books

Nothing Stays the Same

Williamsburg

"This is New York. Nothing stays the same for very long."
J.F. Englert, A Dog Among Diplomats

Tricky

Kent Avenue

"Brooklyn was tricky that way. You had to live there in order to find your way about."
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn