Crazy Love

Rag & Bone

"I would put my love for New York up against anyone else's love for New York. My love affair with this city goes crazy deep, probably to an unhealthy place. If I had my druthers, I would never, ever leave New York, ever."
Steven Pasquale, Theatermania

New York Horror

Alphabet City

"Last year I moved to New York; I lived in New York for a month. And now I know why all of my New York friends want me to move there. They want another warm body between them and the constant spray of sh*t and horror that you are subjected to."
Patton Oswalt, Comedy Central

Religion

Restaurant on the Lower East Side

"Sometimes I think my religion is not Jewish but 'New York'—although, to me, they've always been the same thing."
Richard Grayson, Autumn in Brooklyn

Biggest Apple

Mad. Sq. Park

"I have recently returned from New York. The city that never sleeps. The biggest fucking apple since Steve Jobs or whatever. And yes, it's a pretty sweet place. There are more roof top bars than you can shake a stick at, the subway is air-conditioned and you can eat yourself into obesity with such ease I'm surprised that most people aren't shuffling around in XXL tracksuits, yamming burgers on their way to work."
Lucy Draper, Sabotage Times

Mirror

Chelsea Market

"New York is not an easy place, and it hasn't been easy for me. I've had my best times and my worst times. But I think at the end of the day—like Boston—it's a place that makes you look in the mirror and be honest with yourself and to be accountable for some of the stupid crap you do."
Alex Rodriguez, Boston.com

Pragmatic

East 23rd

"New York is a pragmatic city, and as such it is necessarily an unfinished city, without final ends."
Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City

Only Place

"New York is the place. It is the only place."
Eric Kraft, Reservations Recommended

New York Sins

North Williamsburg

"New York is old—its sins are fixed, the damage is done."
Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings

What's Next

Madison Avenue

"You've never had much use for the past tense, New York, or for those who use it. You've always been a forward-looker, a destroyer and reassembler, the Great What's Next."
Christopher Solomon, The New York Times

Agreeable

"New York is a big place, & is rapidly becoming an interesting one. I am struck, throughout, with the rapid & general increase of the agreeable in American life, & the development of material civilization."
Henry James, Henry James: A Life in Letters

Devil's Playground

"New York was a giant candy store, meat market, insane asylum, performance stage. Surrounded by five million other junkies, addicts, alcoholics, rip-off artists, dreamers, schemers and unsuspecting marks, New York afforded me the luxury of anonymity. The devil's playground."
Lydia Lunch, Paradoxia

Aspiration

Brooklyn Navy Yard

"New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand."
David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace

Schedule

East River Waterfront

"That's the thing about New York: even the crazy people—the loonies, the nutters out on the street—half of them have watches. Even if you're nuts in New York City, you still got a time schedule you have to stay to: 'Uh, let's see—4:30? Conduct pigeon orchestra.'"
Otis Lee Crenshaw, Comedy Central

Camaraderie

Long Island City

"Irrespective of race, religion, political affiliation, borough, or class, we were citizens of New York City, the moving parts of the greatest place on Earth. The camaraderie built while feeling a stranger's breath on your neck on a packed rush-hour train is very real, as is being mashed together in tiny apartments stacked atop one another into the sky."
Cord Jefferson, Gawker

The Idea of Change

Village Voice Building

 "The thing about New York is, it's based on the idea of change. It is the most mutable of places; its strength comes out of that. It doesn't cling to its own history and has been free to invent new ones. Some changes are horrible, others lead us somewhere. They're discomfiting because no one likes change, but eventually, you end up somewhere else, and you discover you like that place."
Milton Glaser, The Village Voice

Surge of Love

LOVE by Robert Indiana / Pixabay

"Whenever I see New York at night a terrific surge of love comes over me. New York is hope and challenge; good and evil; mystery and change and, most of all, the unexpected."
Alex Phillips, New York: The Big Apple Quote Book

Funny Old Town

"It's a funny old town you got here: for like eight or nine months, it makes it hard for you to even exist."
Matthew Goode, The New York Observer

Manhattan

Lower Manhattan

"I love the drive from Manhattan to Brooklyn, when the city is behind you, and you can appreciate it as this singular thing, this unit: Manhattan. It's pretty astounding. Even for someone like me, who's lived here her whole life. I know people joke that New York is the center of the world, but sometimes, on the bridge, it feels true. Like everything and anything of significance takes place right here in my hometown."
Rebecca Serle, The Edge of Falling

Feeling of Life

Oculus

"I loved living in New York City. There was always a feeling of life going on no matter what time of day or night."
Sandra Scoppettone, This Dame for Hire

Rich New Yorkers

Fifth Avenue

"Rich New Yorkers are the worst. They buy up building for themselves and ruin neighborhoods. They're always inventing new types of dogs that the world doesn't need. And what do they do with their money? They give it to charities to cure malaria in other countries. Well, call me crazy, but I say cure malaria at home first."
Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess), The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

On Its Feet

"New York is a town on its feet. Our cities lie down by the rivers or the sea, stretching into the landscape, awaiting the traveller; but this one refuses to bend—it stands erect, straight and intimidating."
 Youssouf Amine Elalamy, A Moroccan in New York

Red Hook

"This is Red Hook, not Sicily. This is the slum that faces the bay on the seaward side of Brooklyn Bridge. This is the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world."
Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge

Merchant of Venice

"NEW YORK: The posthumous revenge of the Merchant of Venice."
Elbert Hubbard, Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard

Stuff of Dreams

NYC Ferry

"For me New York was the world. It was the center. It was Rome, it was Alexandria. It was Babylon! It was the stuff of my dreams."
Catherine Texier, Love Me Tender

Why the City Never Sleeps

Bernard Baruch Way

"We are the city that never sleeps because we're afraid that if we nod off, a rat will birth its young in our open mouths."
Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

Glory, Wealth, Freedom

"They had heard of New York as a place vague and far away, a city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone. All the days of their lives they had heard of it, and it seemed to them the centre of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom in the world."
Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods

Looking Ahead

Third Avenue

"New Yorkers don't look up because they are too busy looking ahead."

Beverly Rose, Both Feet Off the Ground

New York Movement

Times Square

"New York has gone beyond the stage of movement, it is the movement of movement. Like the skyscrapers, time is elevated, but exponentially: while things advance, in Paris, in New York time progresses."
Yann Moix. What Good Are Intellectuals?

Marketplace

Bowery

"New York is an enormous marketplace, a permanent fair, a bazaar without boundaries, where all the Union's and all the world's buyers and sellers meet."
Knut Hamsun, Knut Hamsun Remembers America