New York Feeds Us

Dumbo

"New York is an amazing city. It feeds us with its diversity and energy and cultural complexity."
Karole Armitage, Forbes Magazine

Hard Place to Be Lonely

First Avenue

"The whirring beehive of New York is a hard place to be lonely. If you don’t rise to its level, it’ll leave you left behind."
Philippa Whishaw, Urban Adventures

Dream Space

Central Park West

"New York is the dream space of all my fantasies; the destination of every desired trip; the reality that, when it finally occurs, surpasses everything I imagined."
José Manuel Romero, quoted in Humanos y marcianos en Nueva York II

Intimate Form of Anonymity

Apple Fifth Avenue

"What makes New York, New York to me? I think it's just the ever-changing flow of people and the number of people you interact with on a day-to-day basis. I feel like you don't get that anywhere else. You notice it especially on the subway. It's a funny paradox; the city is so anonymous, you're surrounded by strangers on the street or packed in a subway car, but you're also centimeters away from them. Sometimes literally touching three people at the same time. It's the most intimate form of anonymity I could imagine."
Michelle Salem, Vice

Small City

Union Square

"New York is a small city, in the end, equipped with some strange gravity that is forever pulling you nearer those people you'd rather avoid: you're drawn back to the same places, the same games, ten years down the road."
Jessi Jezewska Stevens,  The Exhibition of Persephone Q

Doppelgänger

Park Avenue

"The pace of the sidewalk here mirrors something inside me and New York will never stop feeling like home. I keep whipping my head around, thinking I see people I recognize. This is a common experience for me in New York. Everyone is a doppelgänger of someone from my past."
Jillian Lauren, Everything You Ever Wanted

Magic

Mail slot in SoHo

"The first time I met you, I didn't know what to think. I was just a girl from North Carolina. You were larger than life and so much fun, but loud and strange. That first time, I was happy to leave. It took me a few years to realize how much I missed you. I'm so glad I got to come back. New York, you are magic."

Melanie Conklin, Counting Thyme

Too Hard for Too Many

Midtown Manhattan

"New York is too hard, for too many. The opportunities, the serendipities, the quintessential experiences and wonders of New York are closed down, and cut off. The thrills and superlatives, the biggest, longest, tallest and best of everything in the world, the very things that more than made up for all the downsides — the rats, high rents, bad smells and loud noises — those things are on pause."
Daily News Editorial Board, NY Daily News

The City That Winks Back

Chambers Street subway station

"I've always said that New York is the city that winks back. It's a main character. It's a friend, a lover, an enemy sometimes."
Maggie Rogers, quoted in Paste Magazine

Glittering from a Distance

Empire State Building

"This was New York: a place that glittered from a distance even when you reached it."

Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

Too Skinny

Lower East Side

"Everybody in New York is too skinny. The women are all, they look so unhappy! Their figures are nice, but their faces are unhappy. People in the midwest are not unhappy."
Theresa Rebeck, Dead Accounts

Eight Million Stories

Rose Main Reading Room

"New York is such a vibrant place to write about. Eight million stories colliding all at once. And what a landscape to operate in. The eye never gets tired."
Colum McCann, Conversations with Colum McCann

New York City is a Planet

Midtown Manhattan

"New York City is a planet all to itself. I'm sure there were some actual Americans living there – but I never met them."

Bruce Frohnen, The Imaginative Conservative

Inspiring New York

Greenpoint

"New York is my favorite city. It is sort of my muse I guess you could say. It is amazing. The energy, the people. The atmosphere is ever changing depending on the season, or the year, or the day. There is no city like it in the world. It continuously inspires me."
Kat Irlin, The Unlimited Magazine

Style and Fashion

Midtown Manhattan

"Growing up in New York, there's a sense of style that you don't really get in too many places, maybe London and Paris. But in America, New York is the center of style and fashion."
Dylan McDermott, Parade

Product of New York

Mural in Chelsea

"I carry New York with me everywhere I go. It's almost written across my forehead. I am a product of New York."
Joey Bada$$, SGB Media

New York is a Lie

South Street Seaport

"New York is a lie, I will tell you. Each city is its own lie, but New York is a whopper. I don't expect you to listen about that. Everyone needs to learn it in their own time."
Lisa Taddeo, Animal

Getting New York

Irving Place

"New York is one of my favourite places, but when I first went it wasn’t quite what I imagined. Then I think I discovered its secret, which is that there are an awful lot of very anonymous-looking brownstone buildings that seem quite drab but, when you go inside, are fantastic. It’s either a coffee shop or a restaurant or a museum. I remember being worried, thinking: 'Am I the first person that doesn't get New York?' Then suddenly it clicked and I realised, 'I love this city.' I think it's a fantastic place."
Mark Gatiss, High Life

Us and the Rest of the World

Brooklyn Bridge 

"In a New Yorker's mind, it's us and then there's the rest of the world."
Ana Maria Vives, The New Yorker Away from Home

One Taste of the Apple

JFK Airport

"All the kids decide the city with its winos and grifters and noise and dirty streets is totally horrid—gross, as kids today would put it—except for a boy who knows at once that New York is the city of his dreams and destiny; the place that will allow him to soar above and beyond the lowest common denominator. One taste of the Apple, and this boy is gloriously seduced and corrupted."
Thomas Adcock, Grief Street

New York is Everything

The Daily News Building

"New York is Europe, Asia, America. It's everything."
Vivian Maier, Vivian Maier Developed

Old Friend

"SKY" by Yoko Ono

"New York is like an old friend. It has its moods. But I know them all. "

Yoko Ono, Twitter

Love Affair

Little Italy

"In order to love New York you have to hate it too. It's like a love affair–you don't hunger for it till it's out of reach, and when you've had your fill, you need to separate. When you return, some of it is unfamiliar, but oh my God, the beauty of it."
Connie Eisenstat, New York Magazine

Illusion and Reality

Brooklyn Bridge Park

"New York is a city where illusion and reality coalesce into the viscous paste, holding larger-than-life souls together."

Brian Kannard, Steinbeck: Citizen Spy

Heaven on Earth

Financial District

"The streets of New York are the closest thing to heaven on earth. Here, you are not scurrying from one place to another as fast as your feet will carry you. You are on display. Without her outcasts, the metropolis would be a very dull place indeed. To succeed in heaven, you must avoid the shadows. If the sunny side of the street is full, walk in the road. And on no account learn the language. The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed."

Quentin Crisp (John Hurt), An Englishman in New York

Surprising City

Paley Park

"The allure of Everywhere Else is very attractive until he realizes that Everywhere Else can never surprise him like New York."

Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

Disappointing Niceness

East 23rd

"We went out and it's, 'Ahhhh! There's steam coming out of the streets!' We thought, 'This is nuts! This is New York!' We went up to somebody's house to ask for directions, hoping they were going to pull a gun on us, and instead they're like, 'Oh, you're not from here?! You should check out this place and that place.' Everybody was really nice. It was really disappointing."
Tim Goldsworthy, Meet Me in the Bathroom

Place to Live

West Chelsea

"New York is hardcore. If you stay there longer than two years, you’re going to get sinus infections. It’s terrible. I never thought of New York as a place to actually live, but people do. They love it, you know?"
Leslie Jones, The New York Times

Own Theater

"Every space in New York is its own theater. If the city offers absolution in anonymity, it also offers fleeting fame in the simple act of walking around."
Vivian Yee, The New York Times

Number One

Harlem

"New York is the big time. If you are No. 1 in New York, that usually means you are No. 1 in the nation."
Alec Cumming and Peter Kanze, New York City Radio

Embracing the New

The New School

"New York is a city that seems dedicated to the proposition that change is its own reward. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose may hold sway in Paris (and may explain why all those bored Parisians are scrambling to get apartments here), but New Yorkers thrive on novelty. New buildings, new restaurants, new styles, new art, new celebrities, new villains, new neighborhoods— all are embraced such fervor that the relics of past enthusiasms are hardly noticed."
Marilyn Bethany, New York Magazine

City of Immigrants

Statue of Liberty

"New York is not just a place, it's an idea. It's this idea of an all-welcoming city of immigrants where everyone can be a New Yorker."
Paul Auster, The Guardian

The Wrong Path

Under the FDR Drive

"There are so many distractions in New York, so many sideshows, it must be easy for people to drift down the wrong path even when they know the right one."

Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel), The Gilded Age

New York's Liveliness

Grand Central Terminal

"Sure, New York’s all-the-time energy is a cliché, so is the whole melting pot thing, but they’re the kind of clichés that exist because they’re true. Do other cities have a lot going on? Yes! Do we care? No. As far as we’re concerned New York’s liveliness is second to none, and bragging about it is our compensation for tiny bathrooms."
Mark Fedeli, Tablet Hotels Magazine

New Times

One World Trade Center

"New York is a vertical city, under the sign of the new times. It is a catastrophe with which a too hasty destiny has overwhelmed courageous and confident people, though a beautiful and worthy catastrophe."

Le Corbusier, quoted in Paradigm Islands

Foundation of Time

East Village

"New York is a theory of a city built on the foundation of time alone. Manhattan is an hour, or a century, with the woodworm of the subways boring through it, eating it away, second by second."
Gilberto Owen, quoted in Latin American Literature at the Millennium

Hustling

Allen Street

"I love New York, because here everyone is hustling all the time. Everyone has things they are constantly working towards."

Melissa Rakiro, Times Square Chronicles

One in a Million

Mural in Williamsburg

"New York is the place where if you really are one in a million, there's seven other people just like you right here in town!"
Alec Baldwin, Vulture

Talismanic Power

14th Street subway station

"Money talks and bullshit walks in New York. In a lot of cities, probably—but here, the nation’s shrine to unrestricted predatory capitalism, money has nearly talismanic power. Which means that he can use it as a talisman."
N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

City of Cities

Fifth Avenue and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir

"Against the blue of the sky are the gray silhouettes of buildings that pierce it (light gray in the sun, darker in shadow), lines, lines, lines. How can anyone say that New York is not beautiful? For me it is the city of cities, ready for the future."
Yelena Bonner, quoted in The City

Something Else

West Village

"The most New York thing about New York is that it's constantly changing. I've been here forever and I still don't recognize it. It's always changing, which is nothing to be nostalgic about. There are a lot of places that are no longer there but something else is there."
Laurie Anderson, Vice

New York Inspiration

Empire State Building

"I get inspired by one thing about New York, which is that it suggests everything is possible. I don’t get inspired by moonlight on the river, but I get inspired by the idea of what is living proof here: this incredible vitality and energy towards making things, producing things."

Milton Glaser, Document Journal

Multi-Color

Midtown Manhattan

"New York is incredibly multicultural, multiracial, multi-color, multi-language and everybody gets by. They don’t always love each other but they, on the whole, are pretty polite to each other. And sometimes they do love each other."

Roger Spottiswoode, Deadline

New York Romance

World Trade Center subway station

"New York has romanced me unlike anything else.  I'm so in love with New York."

Blake Lively, Vogue

Noisy, Dirty, Huge, Crowded

West 34th

"New York is noisy, dirty, huge, crowded, the very worst you hear about it is no doubt true... but there are other things to balance all this, I love a world capital, and this is indeed a center."
Katherine Anne Porter, Letters of Katherine Anne Porter

New York Show

Fifth Avenue

"I think New York is pretty amazing, in every sense. It has the best and the worst of any town in the world. The impulse that it has, the sensation, is unlike anyplace else. Everything on the street is a show. You have to pay attention, no? It's very exciting, but also exhausting."
Javier Bardem, Salon

New York Feeling

Chelsea

"I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels that it is his property,--at least, as much as it is anybody's."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Atlantic

Community of Souls

Williamsburg

"I love New York City because of the community. I love that we live underneath, on top of, and all around one another, and we take care of each other. I love that I can hear someone practicing an aria down the hall or that I can wave hello to the woman who owns the bodega on the corner. It's a community of souls who look out for one another and love one another."
Jenn Colella, NYC Next 

Hungry for Life

Greenwich Village

"New York was for people too hungry for life to be anywhere else."
Katherine Howe, The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

Harmonious Song

Washington Square Park

"New York is a city that houses the world; its five boroughs contain multitudes of people, cultures, and identities. Every neighborhood tells a unique story, hums a different tune. And yet, they all join together to sing a harmonious song."

Darren Walker, JR: The Chronicles of New York City