The Bridge

Met Life Building

"Everybody wants a piece of New York. New York is the hub. New York is international. New York is the bridge. New York means being international."
Donna Karan, Donna Karan, New York

Pretend Skyline

30 Rockefeller Plaza

"It doesn't matter how long you've lived in New York. It's still fun to look up and pretend all the buildings are giant severed robot penises."
Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), 30 Rock

Busboys and Billionaires

News Corp. Building

"It's a city of immigrants and indigents. Busboys and billionaires. Big dreamers and big idiots. Every race and every religion. Every idea and every 'ism.' They're all here. Competing for your time, attention, and bucks. And Sinatra was right: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. This is the place where all my dreams are coming true. Welcome to New York, city of dreams."
Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring

Railroad Station

Grand Central Terminal

"New York is not a civilization; it is a railway station."
John Jay Chapman, Emerson, and Other Essays

Anarchy

Sixth Avenue

"New York is like an experiment. Would anarchy work? Nobody's holding the place together — there's nothing to keep it from exploding into total chaos except the goodwill of the people."
Jerry Garcia, New York Magazine

Polaroid

Park Avenue South

"The streets are filled with neon-lit restaurants that taste like nostalgia, glamour, guilt, and goosebumps. If you've lived here long enough, every corner booth, deli counter, dive bar, coffee shop, and critics darling becomes a Polaroid of your life."

Alyssa Shelasky, Apron Anxiety

Mother

Coney Island

"New Yorkers, however kind and generous, may also come off as opinionated and intrusive. Living with them is a little like being a child again and having your mother with you all the time, helping you, correcting you, butting into your business."

Joan Acocella, Smithsonian Magazine

Mistress

"You get so tuned into the streets, it's like they're paved, pulsing and running through your veins. New York is like that. It grips you like a mistress and won't let you think about home."
Larry Kirwan, Green Suede Shoes

The Heart of New York

"The heart of New York is sympathetic — not exclusively with any single class of humanity, but with all human beings. There is no part of the world which can suffer without causing a thrill of pain in the heart of New York."
Marcus M. Marks, The Independent

Life

Chelsea

"In my mind, life and New York are the same."
E.L. Doctorow, The New York Times

Free from America

Manhattan East and Queensboro Bridge

"My theory about New York is that those of us who live here—and who weren’t born here—came to New York to be free from America and its petty behaviors. We live in an effectively neutral place, free from blowhard America while at the same time enjoying its various freedoms and values. As the joke goes, we came here to live on an island off Europe."
Meakin Armstrong, Guernica Magazine

Apartment Hunting

Zeckendorf Towers

"Looking for an apartment in this city is almost like trying to survive in a Saw film—you can try as hard as you want to beat the system, but ultimately you're going to end up with a mold-filled bathroom and only one foot."
Rebecca Fishbein, Gothamist

Modeling Clay

Rockefeller Center

"New York is like a city made out of modeling clay. You can make it whatever you want."
Truman Capote, Capote: A Biography

New York Grid

"Like the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of being inhabited; if the Romans consulted the heavens for guidance in this effort, the city fathers of New York consulted the banks."
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone

Made Up City

Lego store

"Perhaps what draws me to New York is that, alone among the great cities, it looks created, not over politely differing centuries by emperors or kings or presidents or committees, but somehow all at once on a rainy afternoon. And not so much created as made up, by a child open-mouthed and drooling with concentration, numbering the streets to save time for later, carefully using a ruler for the avenues, marking a big green oblong in the center, dotting it with lollipop trees and calling it Central Park."
Glyn Maxwell, The New York Times

Perpetual Conflict

Governors Island

"With its bouillabaisse of nationalities and ethnicities and  its 8 million ambitious, sometimes clawing personalities squeezed into a rather cramped 309-square-mile patch, New York is a city in perpetual conflict. The big surprise is that there isn't more open warfare."
Joseph Berger, The World in a City

Secret Formula

Human Resources Administration

"There is a secret formula to New York City. There always has been. It only works because it's a place for everyone."
Bill de Blasio, quoted in Newsday

Unsolved

Morningside Heights

"New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most of it unsolved."
Johnny Carson, quoted in The 2,320 Funniest Quotes

Competition

Madison Square Garden

"New York is predicated on competition. Toddlers fight seniors for subway seats."
Casey Rocheteau, The New York Times

New York Neighborhoods

South Street Seaport

"Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks."
Teju Cole, Open City

Citizen of the World

Brazil Day celebration in Midtown

"New York is the greatest city in the world. Twenty blocks away, you're in Italy. Three more blocks, you're in China. You can actually go to Afghanistan. … You go to Spain. You’re a citizen of the world in this city."
Liam Neeson, New York

In Motion

"To be in New York is to be in motion."
Kristin Chenoweth, A Little Bit Wicked

Worst Dressed

Williamsburg

"New York is the worst-dressed rich city in the world. There is an inexplicable lost connection between the countless clothes shops, sophisticated, expensive, modern, classic, amused, serious, postmodern, and vintage, and the stuff, the schmutter that people actually put on in the morning. It's a city where the rich dress worse than the poor."
A.A. Gill, To America With Love

Continent

Midtown Manhattan

"New York was a continent in itself. Through friends and acquaintances I picked up I delighted in exploring the creeks and channels and backwaters of the city . . . always as the visitor, the tourist on his way to the railroad station."
John Dos Passos, The Best Times

Summer is News

Coney Island

"In New York—fidgety, frittering, frenzied, boiling New York—summer itself is news."
Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary

Quiet Time

Gramercy Park East

"In New York it's not three or four A.M. that's the quiet time—there are too many bar stragglers, calling out to each other as they collapse into taxis, yelping into their cell phones as they frantically smoke that one last cigarette before bed. Five A.M., that's the best time, when the clicking of your heels on the sidewalk sounds illicit. All the people have been put away in their boxes, and you have the whole place to yourself."
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Honor

East River waterfront esplanade

"Every day that I walk throughout the city, I feel honored to be a part of it—an atom in the blood of a beating heart belonging to the most wonderfully diverse, smart, creative, passionate being."
Melisa Singh, I Am Here

What America Stands For

Oculus

"New York is the very best of what America stands for."

Suzanne Oliver, The Faith Club

Don't Belong

JFK airport (Wikimedia Commons)

"New York is the place you come to when you don't belong anywhere else. "

Cynthia Ceilan, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said About New York

Attitude

"New York definitely plays a huge part in who I am today. It gives me that, 'I need it now' attitude, that do-it-yourself attitude. That hustler's ambition, that fast speed, the whole attitude of no sleep."
Joey Bada$$, Gothamist

New York is Crazy

"I realized that New York is crazy. It's difficult to think straight here! There is too much of everything — too much poorness, too much richness."
Harold Carlton, Sacrifice