Factory

Greenpoint

"New York is all haste and noise and sullen heat. Even in the streets I felt as if I were trapped inside a huge, smoky, deafening factory. Everything was always on the move, there was never a moment of cessation or stillness."
John Banville, Shroud

Mighty City

East River

"Around the island of Manhattan, and even far away at sea, men lifted their faces and marvelled at this wonderful work of man glowing here in the heart of the mighty city. Commerce had reared her proudest altar here on this most opulent island in all history."
Joaquin Miller, The Destruction of Gotham

Subjective

"Seems to me there is no true New York, only your New York. It is the most subjective of cities, a place that is hard not to take personally."
David Gilbert, The New Yorker

Manhattan Mystery

"I feel it's important to stay as connected to the ground as possible and New York provides for that, if by virtue of merely the size of the buildings around you. And the stature of the people who roll through here. It's like there's always someone more important than you in New York. And they might be living right next door to you, and you don't even know it. They’re getting Chinese delivery, you accidentally get to peek into their apartment and you’re like, 'Oh my god, the ceilings are 14-feet in there!'You know, it's like, one of those neat, mysterious things about the city, and more and more so that's primarily Manhattan."
Jason Sudeikis, Gothamist

New York Money

Rockefeller Plaza

"In New York, money was there to gawk at, money the likes of which I had never seen. It strolled down Fifth and Park Avenues, alone or in pairs, and it laughed and conversed behind the windows of restaurants at tables with wine bottles and pressed white linen napkins and low candles. It stepped out of taxis in shoes with soles that appeared never to have touched a sidewalk, and it slumped gracefully in the backseat of chauffeured limousines. It sparkled in displays of watches and earrings and scarves in stores I was too shy to enter."
Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future

Old New York

East 17th Street

"It was grittier in this neighborhood. There was a sense of history. It was old New York, except that there were also a few pizza places, upscale cocktail lounges, and packs of young people standing outside bars. There was a disconnect between people and backdrop, as if we were all presupposed into this .universe. It was modern-day life in an old setting, a taste of how New York used to be at the turn of the century. It gave us a chance to see what it ..was like, to feel like the city might actually be dangerous, even though, in reality, it wasn't. It was just enough danger to be fun."
Leslie Cohen, This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

Holy Ground

"My love for New York is very, very deep. Because of the theater it has been my mecca since early childhood. Every film, every photograph spoke of the promise of a new life, worth dreaming of… It is holy ground for me."
Val Kilmer, Woodward Gallery

Gigantism

"All in all, New York represents the most extreme case of grotesque gigantism until now achieved by mankind. It suits me just fine.”
Max Beckmann, Max Beckmann in New York

American Ambitions

The Beresford

"Until you have lived in New York, you haven't lived. The city is a reason to love America in part because it is a distillation of American ambitions. It also shows what happens when those ambitions are distributed among eight million people living in tight and steely quarters."
Roger Rosenblatt, Where We Stand

Male

NY subway station (Pixabay)

"New York is male. Manhattan is like a penis! It's a hard city, strong, dynamic and active. It's the yang of cities."
Gonzalo de Cora Sierto, Humanos y marcianos en Nueva York

Utopian World

Dumbo

"Brooklyn's kind of amazing, I'm not gonna lie. It’s a strange, utopian, fabulous world. John and I have become institutionalised; we just stay in Brooklyn now. The people are cool, we walk everywhere. The restaurants are fabulous and everyone has a stroller. So we fit right in."
Emily Blunt, Evening Standard

Assault on the Senses

"New York is an assault on your senses. Every other moment you feel like you’ve stepped into a movie. You can almost see the air warp and blur as you step in and out of a New York set piece – construction workers whistling at you as you walk, a Wall Street suit biting into a hot dog, an uptown girl walking her poodle in sky-high heels. And then the air blurs again and you’re back as yourself, out of the movie and into the unscripted."
Grethe Kemp, Traveller 24

Self Expression

"I have enjoyed New Yorkers so much. I like the way the people are. I like that people just yell at you in the street and then they're like, 'Okay, bye.' Everybody just expresses themselves and then moves on with it. Passive-aggressive behavior just doesn't exist in that city."
Missy Pegregrym, Parade

Friendly Rain

"Rain in New York seems to arrive from so great a distance, picking its way through so many intervening obstacles, as to be a friend bearing a precious message."
John Updike, Architectural Digest

Battlers

''I love New York. I love everything it stands for. It's a city of battlers. I don't care if you're Harry Helmsley, Donald Trump, Mayor Koch or Joe Jones working on a construction site, you've got to battle for everything from the time you get up till you go to bed. I think New York epitomizes what made this country great.''
George Steinbrenner, The New York Times

Needs and Wants

"New York is huge and inscrutable and narcissistic; it's so self-involved that your needs and wants are irrelevant Your needs and wants are funny to New York It laughs about them. It laughs itself sick"
Anne Lamott, Crooked Little Heart

Reputation

Broadway

"New Yorkers had a reputation for being rude, and there was the standard joke about not making eye contact. But New Yorkers weren't rude; they were just trying to get from point A to point B on an island that was sometimes filled with more than twenty million people."
Heather Graham, Flawless

Menagerie

"A metropolis, a menagerie filled with yellow, white, red, black, brown. You name it; it all exists in New York. Every color of the rainbow, every language of the planet, every food of the world, every fantasy you can imagine… nearly every."
Gayle Kirschenbaum, Medium

New York is New York

"New York—as every American who does not live there will only be too happy to tell you—is not America. New York is the Big Apple while America is a land of small cities. New York is cosmopolitan while America is rustic. New York never sleeps while America turns out the lights at nine thirty. New York is spendthrift and bohemian while America is based on the puritanical ideals of work ethic and family. In short, New York is New York while America is Lynn, Massachusetts."
Yair Lapid, Memories After My Death

Giant Machine

Williamsburg

"Madhouses like New York absorb life, swallow it whole. City as vacuum cleaner. It rumbles, it heaves, it coughs, it's an engine of the global industrial economy. It's supposed to be noisy and cantankerous and brash and irreverent—it's a giant machine."
David Rosane, Still the Same Hawk

Street Theater

"Where politer European cities might have had street mimes, New York has always had the Brechtian street theater of pavement psychodrama: the muttering, bellowing, gesticulating and teetering looney tunes for whom the drugs are no longer working, who look like characters from Exodus, prophets of urban collapse and carnal comeuppance."
A.A. Gill, The Golden Door

Fairy-Tale Cardboard City

Manhattan

"The sky over New York always looks low, and now in the night, the brightly lit tops of the skyscrapers seemed not only to reach stars but also be carved out of those. Manhattan looked like a fairy-tale cardboard city."
Joseph Migirov, Mister Broadway

Positive Force

"One of the things I like here is that it is not all about class and where you went to school and what your parents do, and everyone in New York is from somewhere else, and that creates a very positive force. I love it here."
Anna Wintour, quoted in Winners: And How They Succeed