New York and New Jersey

"New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from."
Fran Lebowitz, The Fourth--and by Far the Most Recent--637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said

Writing New York

The Strand

"A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I'm writing about New York."

Lana del Rey, GQ magazine

Mediterranean City

East 42nd Street

"New York is not an American city. It's a European, Mediterranean city that just happens to be on your side of the Atlantic."
Umberto Eco, The New York Times

Fuck This Place

NBA store

"New York is the greatest city on the planet, I think. But you're not a New Yorker if you don't wake up some days and be like 'man, fuck this place.'"
Carmelo Anthony, Vice

No Respect

"In New York a person gets absolutely no respect—everybody is simply too busy."
Knut Hamsun, Knut Hamsun Remembers America

Charismatic

Financial District

"You'll find earth-shattering sex, endlessly stimulating conversation, and transcendence in New York City, in great multitudes. The sheer number of people—many of whom are looking for the same things, who have similar stars in their eyes—allows for all kinds of possibility. It makes it very magnetic and alluring, like the most charismatic person you'll ever know."

Sari Botton, The Atlantic

Huge and Brutal

"I love New York's energy and, in a funny way, the lack of concession to human scale: everything is huge and brutal, including the architecture, the pace, and the weather."
Lee Child, Daily Mail

Systole and Diastole

Financial District

"The poetry of New York is not that of a practical concrete building that scrapes the sky; the poetry of New York is that of a giant many-piped organ of red ivory -- it does not scrape the sky, it resounds in it, and it resounds in it with the compass of the systole and the diastole of the visceral canticles of elementary biology."

Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

Ceaseless Buzz

"There is something about this ceaseless buzz, and hurry, and bustle, that keeps a stranger in a state of unwholesome excitement all the time, and makes him restless and uneasy, and saps from him all the capacity to enjoy anything or take a strong interest in any matter whatsoever -- something which impels him to try to do everything, and yet permits him to do nothing."
Mark Twain, Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography

On Top of Each Other

Coney Island

"It's interesting how many funny people are from Brooklyn. Maybe it's because everyone is piled on top of each other, you have to distinguish yourself in some way. The funniest people I know are from Brooklyn."
Jimmy Kimmel, The Brooklyn Paper

You Haven't Lived...

"You haven't lived until you died in New York."
Alexander Woollcott, quoted in Time Out New York

True Love

"I must be daft, but I am more in love than ever with this horrendous city. New York is the only true love of my life."
Italo Calvino, Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941 - 1985

Loudmouth New Yorkers

"New York is a big, dirty town, with loudmouth cops and even loudermouth women."
Larry O'Connor, The Penalty Box

Impersonal

"New Yorkers are so impersonal, if it wasn't for muggings there wouldn't be any contact at all!"
Robert Orben, quoted in 2,000 Sure-fire Jokes for Speakers

Small Island

"New York is a small island where the tall skyscrapers, rising from the sea, pierce the atmosphere and silhouette the blue skies which blanket our churches, our cathedrals, our synagogues. It is a city of 8 million striving for sanctuary, sustenance, inspiration, fulfillment."
Eleanor Roosevelt, Grandmère

New York Mets

"God is living in New York City and he's a Mets fan."
Tom Seaver, Winning in Both Leagues

Sex in New York

Museum of Sex

"Sex in New York City is different because it happens in smaller rooms."
Sherry Lansing, The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said

New York Pulse

Park Avenue

"There's a pulse in New York, even on the quietest street, on the quietest day. It's full of potential."
George Carlin, Esquire

New York Circles

P.S. 75

"New York is a place where circles almost never intersect, except transactionally—at co-op meetings and parent-teacher conferences, or on jury duty. New Yorkers circulate mostly within their own class and occupational orbits. Manhattan is a hundred small towns unevenly distributed over some twenty-two square miles of city space."
Louis Menand, The New Yorker

New York Fall

"Fall in New York is pretty superb. You are just holding onto the beauty before the winter. Before you are just punched repeatedly with winter."
Miriam Shor, Broadway World

New York Streets

"The streets in New York City are their own country. A knowledge of them gives one a sense of power. It makes no difference that for the most part New York is a giant grid, supremely traversable compared with such labyrinths as Paris or London. Its power heaves up from the pavement right in front of your eyes, steam escapes in fits and starts as if the whole place were going to blow any minute, people who have already blown apart lie in its crevasses, and all the while there is a thin promise, a slight wheedling tone, that something important, something drastic, is about to break."
Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

Electrified

Con Ed Plant

"Every nerve in my body was electrified by New York. I was on an endless sidewalk surrounded by bare bulbs and whistles and sudden flocks of pigeons and huge fading stretches of concrete. I believe that I will never feel like that again—so raw and so moved."
Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land

Climbing

Fifth Avenue

"New York is like Everest. If you're a really good climber, you have to try it."
Bonnie Koloc, New York Magazine

Magnet

"I told him that I was in New York City, the capital of the world. He said, 'That's a good joke.' But it wasn't a joke. New York City was the magnet—the force that draws objects to it, but take away the magnet and everything will fall apart."
Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume 1

Penal Colony

"New York is a penal colony. Part Troy, part mall. The rivers and oceans are natural moats keeping the maniacs in, and the rest of the country relatively safe."
John Devore, Medium

Vertical and Horizontal

"I found New York the way I expected it to be; a kind of immense vertical mess set upon a square horizontal order."
Nicolas Nabokov, quoted in New York Vertical

Muck

 "This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor."
Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

Clowns of New York

"The best thing to do in New York City is just walk out your door and go, and check out all the people. Because you will see clowns in New York City, whether it’s the aggressive businessman or the drunk on the street who talks to himself; if you stop and listen, you might hear something beautiful or you might hear utter nonsense."
Joseph Gorden-Levitt, Gotham Magazine

Obsolete

"A city like New York is obsolete. People will no longer concentrate in great urban centers for the purpose of work. New York will become a Disneyland, a pleasure dome."
Marshall McLuhan, The New York Times

Profanity

Chelsea

"I've often left a theater saying, 'Why is there so much unnecessary profanity in that movie? No one actually talks like that!' Then I started working each week in New York. Guess what? People do talk like that!"
Mike Huckabee, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy

Snob

Battery Park

"Any real New Yorker is a you-name-it-we-have-it snob . . . whose heart brims with sympathy for the millions of unfortunates who through misfortune, misguidedness or pure stupidity live anywhere else in the world."

Russell Lynes, New York: The Big Apple Quote Book