Sixth Sense

"There's a sixth sense you develop just because it's New York. I think being from here, you can shake someone's hand and can tell immediately if you're gonna like them or not. It's the way of the jungle."
Jmaes Caan, The Daily News

The Myth of New York

Top of the Rock

"I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself."
Ling Ma, Severance

Good Fight

Dumbo

"Like the hard-nosed coach or teacher who pushed me to the brink and never cut me any slack, New York may have made me curse its name from time to time, but ultimately I can’t imagine loving another city more. Come give it a swing if you're up for a good fight."
Mark Radcliffe, The Good Men Project

Friendly New York

"People say that the city is a microcosm of the country, but in many ways it is friendlier (yep, that's what I said) than a lot of the country. Different peoples get along better in New York than they do most anywhere else because of a kind of shared civilized wildness born of compression."
Roger Rosenblatt, Where We Stand

Excess

Manhattan skyline (Pixabay)

"Manhattan rose up in my consciousness like some awful Gotham-like metropolis. New York is about excess. Everything is excessive. lt is not just its size (there are far bigger cities), but also its sense of grandiosity. The glass, steel and glitz."

Wilma Cruise, De Arte

Commitment

"New York is not an escape: it's a commitment, a war. It makes you feel like acting, facing things, changing them. You like it in the way that you like things, say, when you are twenty."

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pier Paolo Pasolini

The End of the World

Canal Street subway station

"I spend a lot of time thinking about how I will almost definitely be the first one to die in the apocalypse.  It's kinda hard not to think about the end of the world when you live in New York City, considering there's already a very fine line between order and chaos here, and all it really takes to send us into primitive panic is a delayed subway train, an inch of snow, or a giant ball of glitter falling in Times Square on New Year's Eve."
Matt Bellassai, Everything is Awful

New York on the Brain

"The most visible and peculiar trait of New York folks," answered Bud, "is New York. Most of 'em has New York on the brain. They have heard of other places, such as Waco, and Paris, and Hot Springs, and London; but they don't believe in 'em."
O. Henry, Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

Showy Queen

Manhattan skyline and Dumbo (Pixabay)

"The island of Manhattan has always been one showy queen, her skyscrapers of sexual visibility casting long dark shadows over the benighted 'outer boroughs.'"
Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn Was Queer

Delirium Tremens

First Avenue

"I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit."
P.G. Wodehouse, Enter Jeeves

Marketer of Echoes

East 18th Street

"New York is a great marketer of echoes. The past is translated even into Village rentals and real estate values, into meal prices and hotel rates.  New York seems to thrive also on a sense of national deficiency, on the feelings of many who think themselves sunk hopelessly in unsatisfactory places, in the American void where there is no color, no theater, no vivid contemporaneousness, where people are unable to speak authoritatively, globally, about life."
Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up

Cacophony

"New York is this cacophony — a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs." 
Thom Mayne, The New York Sun

Tricky Business

Williamsburg

"A tricky business, that of understanding New York. The city is always on the move, forever shifting."
Mario Maffi, New York City: An Outsider's Inside View

Ready for the Magic

"You want to wake up in a city that never sleeps and say, I can make it here. I am ready for the magic. And when that moment happens, when you know you are ready for the magic, that's when you should move to New York City."
Brian Rashid, Forbes

Un-American

Q train

"I realize it's profoundly un-American of me not to drive. But I never felt profoundly American to begin with. I'm from Brooklyn."
Maggie Estep, Gartantuan

Vanishing Breed

"Walking around the East Village, I just want to cry at the state of it. There are so many fuckin' jocks everywhere! It's like a frat house everywhere. I don’t know if it's a sign of the times, but where are the real weirdos? The real outcasts? They're a vanishing breed here."
Chloe Sevigny, Refinery 29

State of Mind

NYC Ferry

"New York is as much a state of mind as it is an extraordinary city. Every day, its island heart, Manhattan, fuels the imagination and induces awe, inspired by the city's scale, audacious achievements, pioneering spirit, creative endeavours and endless reinvention."
Alexandra Carroll, New York

Indifferent Lover

"That is what New York is: an indifferent lover. She doesn't care if you spend the night or go home. She will gladly take, but she won't necessarily give back. Loyalty is one luxury that this luxury town seldom offers."
George Hahn, So Long, New York

Definition of Nature

East 17th Street

"The definition of nature in New York is a little different to the rest of the world, but here we see a tree and that's pretty darn good."
Leonard Steinberg, Architectural Digest

Gone New York

"When I arrived in the city in 1976, New York was financially a wreck. But to me it's the New York that Matthew and I literally try to find every day of our lives. It was the best place in the world. It was literature. It promised everything. And for someone who loved food and smells and stimulation, who was rocked to sleep by the sound of taxis—well, there’s just so much money now, and the city is so affluent, and all the colors, all the shops, the look of a street from block to block is just terribly absent of distinguishing coffee shops, bodegas. All of that stuff that made it possible to live in New York is gone."
Sarah Jessica Parker, New York Magazine

Young Girl

"New York is like a young girl, eager, healthy, vivacious and still full of illusions. New York is still young enough to be gauche, sometimes to be sentimental, occasionally even to be sloppy, but she is also young enough still to feel faith in romance and to participate in new things and to set out on adventures."
St. John Ervine, Vanity Fair

Steam Room

"It was August in New York, which I didn't yet know is the lousiest month of the year here. The air is thick and damp, and you constantly have the feeling that you're in a steam room fueled entirely by urine."
Andrew Rannells, Too Much Is Not Enough