On Fire

Engine 47 in Morningside Heights

"New York has always been in charge. When New York is on fire, the world is on fire."
Shaquille O'Neal, New York Post

Big Heart

Third Avenue

"My hometown New York also has a big heart. It doesn't like to see itself in that way, but we do come together when need be, often in moments of crisis."
Anthony Bourdain, Vogue Magazine

Money Makin' Manhattan

Financial District

"The borough of Manhattan was made for business. It resides in the heart of New York, and that's how it got its name, Money Makin' Manhattan."
B. Mac, It Was All a Dream

Refusing to Say Goodbye

Buildings in Midtown Manhattan

"New York is still here, but it is also not. For those of us who have remained, the task seems to fall somewhere between caretaking — we will order pickup and takeout from the places that have served us so well, we will do our shopping for our neighbors—  and refusing to let go. We ain't going nowhere. New York in this moment may be saying goodbye to us, but we refuse to say goodbye to New York."
Glynnis MacNicol, The Best American Travel Writing 2021

Christmas in New York

Christmas decorations on Roosevelt Island

"Santaland is ready to debut
But Macy's is so packed you can't get through
The kids are lined up everywhere
Spilling out into the Square
Suddenly it's Christmas in New York."
Lea Michele, Christmas in New York

New York at Christmastime

NYSE Christmas Tree

"I don't know why people say New York is magical at Christmastime. It's just a sea of women in black with seasonal affective disorder and tourists who won't get out of my fucking way."
Anonymous, via Overheard in New York

Alive and Enriched

Greenwich Street

"New York is the first place that I felt at home. It just makes sense to me. The people make sense. I make sense to myself. I feel alive there and enriched with every step. I love New York."
Bellamy Young, BELLA New York Magazine

Freedom and Responsibility

Jane's Carousel

"New York provides young people with an enormous amount of responsibility and enormous amount of freedom, in comparison to growing up elsewhere. You're not limited to access to things by vehicles, or by getting moved around by your parents, if you're in the suburbs, hypothetically. There is full access to everything, really, that you could fill your every day with something new at that age. So I think that that's really what New York was, was this large amount of freedom and a large amount of responsibility." Matthew Daddario, Flaunt

Originally from New York City

Court Square subway station

"I'm originally from New York City. What does that mean? Well, it means that I’m very particular about my bagels. Very particular. And my pizza. It means I didn’t get my driver’s license till I was 22, because who needs a car when you have the subway? And when somebody says 'the city,' they’re obviously referring to New York City—I don’t care if you are in California, New York is obviously where you are headed this weekend if you said you are going to a club in the city."
Freida McFadden, Female First

Rich New Yorker

JP Morgan's study

"I'm going to be a New Yorker and a rich one, which is the only kind to be."
Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen), A Haunting in Venice

Capital of the World

United Nations Way

"For all its problems, it’s still the capital of the world. You can’t get away from it. You can’t get tougher and smarter and richer and glossier than you can here. It isn’t going to happen in Poughkeepsie."
Cindy Adams, The Guardian

Limited Life

Times Square subway station

"I think New York is good for me in that my life is very limited. I have to take my kids to school, I do a very small amount of things, I don’t have adventures. If I was doing that in some rural village in England, I would feel that my subject is very small, whereas in New York, even though I walk three blocks, there’s an amazing amount of people in those three blocks, and an amazing amount of things to see. Just getting on the subway is useful to me. I’m lucky, the world comes to me. I don’t have to do much."
Zadie Smith, The Tulane Hullabaloo

New York and the Rest of the World

Duke Ellington Memorial

"You don't have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker! Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein, two of the most representative composers of the city, were born in other states, just like a great number of its inhabitants. To be a New Yorker is more like a mental state—one of many ways to act, an attitude towards life and the rest of the world. Many people say the planet is divided in two: New York and the rest of the world."
Paquito D'Rivera, Letters to Yeyito

On the Streets

Lower East Side

"New York is a town where you spend a lot of time out on the streets, going from one place to another. You’re out there, and you just have to have a little bit kind of a protective layer over yourself, a little bit of a thicker skin to deal with lots of people coming your way."
Michael Imperioli, Variety

What New Yorkers Love

Harlem Meer

"New Yorkers love their home. They love the culture and the excitement, the bright life in a big city. They love the opera and the luxury of a well-spoken play. They love the park in its seasons—ice skating in winter and walks through great lakes of leaves in the fall, and long naps in the sunshine of the park on spring afternoons."
Jenna-Clare Allen, As the Spark Flies Upwards

City of Shining Lights

Baruch Way

"New York is a city of shining lights which attracts anyone with a modicum of talent wanting to break into the big time."
Danny Griffiths, Metro

Incredible Parties

Velvet rope in Times Square

"New York is a fabulous lady who gives incredible parties. You're never invited, but you know they're there, and you know that once you get inside, it's going to be great."
Thomas Adcock, Drown All the Dogs

Open Arms

Statue of Liberty

"New York always was, and always will be, a city with open arms."
Peter Chase (Dylan Walsh), Blue Bloods

We Ain't Playin'

Court in Downtown Manhattan

"We're hunters, we take pride in airin' our prey out
Leavin 'em laid out, dead, in just a sport
Cause we ain't playin' up here in New York."

DJ Khaled, New York

Becoming a Movie Star

Lucille Lortel Playwrights' Sidewalk

"You know what small-town folk think of the big city. To them, moving to New York is like becoming a movie star."
Nicki Night, His Love Lesson

Surprising New York

Flower District

"New York is very user-friendly if you don’t want to be in a car all the time. It can also provide you with surprises because it’s so compressed—if you walk around, you just find things."
Susan Sarandon, Interview Magazine

Hum of Life

Midtown Manhattan

"Leaving the country and moving to the city may have been the start of my love of living in a place where there is a kind of pulse that one can hear and feel. One reason I love lying in bed in New York is the constant sound of taxis and the hum of life that makes my pulse race."
Peter Keogh, Filling in the Gaps

Most American of Places

Fire hydrant in Hell's Kitchen

"New York is the most American of all places. Americans think of it as the most foreign of America cities, but of course it is the place where capitalism and democracy, these two great American impulses, came bubbling out of the ground for so long, and so much of what we think of as America was born here first."
Ric Burns, CNN

Nonstop Hopefulness

Freemans Alley

"The thing I learned about living in New York before I fully understood what it meant to be a New Yorker is that things are different here than they are everywhere else. There’s this nonstop hopefulness, this weird charge that never leaves the air, like anything can happen. Like your destiny is constantly right around the corner."
Emma Lord, When You Get the Chance

Cult of New York

Marble Collegiate Church and Empire State Building

"It's like everyone born here is auto-enrolled in the cult of New York."
Wade Grey (Richard T. Jones), The Rookie

The Nicest

Brooklyn Bridge Park

"In my experience, New Yorkers are the nicest. Of course there are exceptions and I’m typically not chatting up strangers on the subway or in an alley, but the negative reputation New Yorkers receive is hardly deserved. Most people in New York are incredibly helpful, probably because many of them also moved here from somewhere else and can understand the struggle."
Tobias van Schneider, vanschneider.com

Thankful for New York

Inflating of the Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons

"I’m thankful for the randomness that is this city. You can hop from a pop-up museum for ’90s snack foods and then find the best slice of pizza for only $2.75, followed by stumbling upon a secret bar behind a hot dog shop. NYC has so many cool and eclectic spots. You can live here forever and still find new things to do."
Jonathan Hartig, Time Out New York

Pieces of a Pie

Building in Long Island City

"That's what New York is to me, small pieces of a huge pie, and everything connects together through the lens of love."
Dhonielle Clayton, Entertainment Weekly

Own Hearbeat

Third Avenue

"Hardly anybody in our class has been to New York City, so we’re all just a little wide-eyed about it. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place so alive. It’s a city that has its own heartbeat."

Jenny Han, Always and Forever, Lara Jean

Filled with Ghosts

Ghost bike on Flatbush Avenue

"New York is stubborn. It's filled with ghosts who won't let you forget who and what came before you. No matter how it changes, New York is still where it's at. It will always be where it's at."
Jane L. Rosen, A Shoe Story

Plugging Yourself

Zuccotti Park

"You have to become very calm because New York is so hectic. Arriving in New York is like plugging yourself into electricity."
Carolina Herrera, WWD

Crazy in Love

Romeo and Juliet statue

"I love New York City. I am so crazy in love with it, so excited on the occasions when I get to return to it from my home upstate, even just for brief work-related appointments on frigid winter afternoons, that I almost can’t see straight."
Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye

Magic Words

Civic Center

"The words 'New York' are charged with a magic based on the belief that anything can happen to anybody in a city that exists for everyman. New York is a bastion of accomplishment, a tabula rasa town where nobody cares what your last name is or who your husband is or what your connections are."
Michael Graham, Redneck Nation

Achieving Dreams

World Trade Center

"I think New York is one of those cities where, whatever your ambition is, you can look around and instantly see someone achieving that dream, often at a level that you never even knew was possible. That experience can be dispiriting, but also extremely inspiring."
Adrian Tomine, The New Yorker

Moving to New York

Moving in day at Columbia University

"I feel like moving to New York is a lot like having a kid. If you feel like you’re ready, you’re probably the most unequipped person. You’re not supposed to feel like you’re ready so that you take the care that it takes to make the move correctly."
Josh Johnson, Vulture

Immigrant Metropolis

"The Immigrants" monument

"Perhaps it’s because I grew up in Russia, Canada, and Australia that I’ve always felt drawn to New York, that great immigrant metropolis. Or, perhaps it’s the city’s limitless size paired with its densely packed streets, which continue to yield surprises the more one wanders; the heady sense of human industry as soon as you step foot into Penn Station; the celebrated literary and artistic pedigree. It is, to me, all the things a city would be — warts and all — if one were to distill so many of the world’s population centers down to their essence, and use the concentrate to build something anew."
Ilia Blinderman, The Pudding

Woody Allen

Woody Allen wax figure at Madame Tussauds

"New York is a hellhole. A miserable excuse for a city. A place where no one in his right mind would live. (And it’s not just because my ex-wife lives there.) The truth is, the only thing I like about New York is Woody Allen, and apparently, a lot of New Yorkers don’t like him. Go figure."
Paul Whitefield, Los Angeles Times

Part of the United States

Empire State Building

"In a single park in the Bronx, you hear ten different languages in 20 minutes. It's a very stimulating city, a small world. The only bad thing about this city is that it's part of the United States."
Valeria Luiselli, Vanguardia

Hits You in the Face

Morningside Heights

"New York is a city that hits you in the face when you walk out the door — and you better be ready for it."
Les Moonves, Smithsonian

Sense of Power

Manhattan Municipal Building

"I like New York very much. It is the capital of America. You can breathe the grandiose air. People say that if I have a negative quality, it's that I never get enough. But in New York, I get enough. The sense of power in New York—everything is going to happen better in New York."
Elio Fiorucci, quoted in I Used to Be Charming

New York Kids

Parked strollers at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

"I think raising kids in New York is just so great, it's so special. It's like, as I got older and as I went to college and I traveled, nothing ever intimidated me growing up in New York."
Jerry O'Connell, Salon

Intellectual Energy

College Walk at Columbia University

"New York is my ideal home. It has the vigor, the intellectual energy, and the chaos I thrive on."
Bharati Mukherjee, New York Magazine

Emotional City

Riverside Park

"New York is a very emotional city. One day you can be feeling very good, feeling like you accomplished a lot, and the next day you can feel very lonely and swallowed up by it, because it’s so big. Your emotions run crazy."
Janet Jones Gretzky, NY Daily News

City of Contrasts

Williamsburg

"New York is truly an urban giant, a city of contrasts, at once beautiful and ugly, a city of wealth and poverty."
David Abramovich, A Soldier's Life

Friendly New Yorkers

"Central Perk" (2014)

"People in New York are friendlier than the rest of the world warned me they would be. When I tell Rachel this, she says, 'Most people here aren't assholes. They're just busy.'"
Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

Plugged into the Matrix

Worker on Fifth Avenue

"New York is a good place to get things done. Because you’re just doing your thing. In California, you’re like, 'Let’s go on a hike; let’s eat beautiful food.' In New York, you’re just plugged into the matrix."
Emma Cline, BarnesandNoble.com

Going Up and Up

Park Avenue Buildings

"A city on an island, teeming with cash and ego, has nowhere to go but up. And up. And up. Imagine the Manhattan skyline in a time-lapse filmstrip, starting around 1890 — when the New York World Building crested above the 284-foot spire of Trinity Church — and culminating in the present day: it is a series of continual skyward propulsions, each new proud round overshadowing the last."
Michael Kimmelman, New York Times Magazine

Greatest Place in the Universe

Lower Manhattan seen from the Staten Island Ferry

"I know not everyone thinks New York is the greatest place but I do. I think New York City is the greatest place in the entire universe. I love it and I miss it." Casey Neistat, Twitter

Eat You Alive

Chelsea Market

"You shouldn't come here when you're totally green. You should have an idea of what you're doing or New York will eat you alive."
Champian Fulton, How to Make It in the Music Business

World Influences

Columbus Park

"That’s why I love New York. There are so many people here that are from so many different places and it’s very inspiring. I am definitely a citizen of the world and I feel most at home when I have such influences around me. To me, New York is the capital of the world."
Joel Kinnaman, The Last Magazine