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50 Quotes About New York City: True, Not True?

We heart NY.

New York is the only real city-city. -Truman Capote

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years. -Tom Wolfe

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance. -Nora Ephron

New York remains what it has always been: a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring – it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence. -Paul Goldberger

I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid. -Sherwood Anderson

As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night. -Dorothy Parker

Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. -F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. –Joan Didion

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire. -Henry James

Each man reads his own meaning into New York. -Meyer Berger

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. -John Updike

I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it. -Truman Capote

New York City is all about sex. People getting it, people trying to get it, people who can’t get it. No wonder the city never sleeps. It’s too busy trying to get laid. -Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City

In Rome I am weighted down by a lack of momentum, the inertia of a spent civilization. In New York I feel plugged into a strong alternating current of hope and despair. -Ted Morgan

A great many people go after success simply for the shiny prizes it brings… And nowhere is it pursued more ardently than in the city of New York. -Stephen Birmingham

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world. -Pearl S. Buck

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy. -Evelyn Waugh

The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of license that distinguishes New York. It is rather, a lust of the total ego for recognition, even for eminence. More than elsewhere, everybody here wants to be somebody. -Sydney J. Harris

I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need. -Lady Gaga

Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage. New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down. -LCD Soundsystem

Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went. -Jack Kerouac

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. -Albert Camus

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world. -Alistair Cooke

Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. -Tom Hanks as Joe Fox in You’ve Got Mail

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. -Edna Ferber  

Everybody ought to have a Lower East Side in their life. -Irving Berlin

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible – because it is large enough to be incurious. -Ford Madox Ford

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream. -Helen Keller

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. -Le Corbusier

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. -Agatha Christie

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? -Ayn Rand

More than anything else New York is a city of superlatives, a place where the best, the brightest, the biggest is the norm. -Marilyn J. Appleberg    

She has become a wicked and wild bitch in her old age has Manhattan, but there is still no sensation in the world quite like walking her sidewalks. Great surges of energy sweep all around you; the air fizzes like champagne, while always there is a nervous edge of fear and whispered distant promises of sudden violence. -Tom Davies

New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer. -Henry Miller

He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion… no, make that: he – he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. -Woody Allen in Manhattan

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world’s great cities – in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East. -John Gregory Dunne  

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough. -Fran Lebowitz

In New York City, one suicide in ten is attributed to a lack of storage space. -Judith Stone

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them — this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air. -F. Scott Fitzgerald

New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don’t know what the hell the rest of the United States is. -Henry Ford  

If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe. -Ellen R. Shapiro       

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. -Simone De Beauvoir

New York is definitely haunted. Old lovers, ex-boyfriends, anyone you have unresolved issues with you are bound to run into again and again until you resolve them. -Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City    

Maybe New York’s just too big a town. There’s millions of people in this city. How in all this mess is a guy supposed to find the love of his life? I mean, where do you even begin? -Josh Radnor as Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. -Joan Didion

I’m going to show you the real New York – witty, smart, and international – like any metropolis. Tell me this: where in Europe can you find old Hungary, old Russia, old France, old Italy? In Europe you’re trying to copy America, you’re almost American. But here you’ll find Europeans who immigrated a hundred years ago – and we haven’t spoiled them. Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world’s in New York. – Oriana Fallaci  

New York walking isn’t exercise: it’s a continually showing make-your-own movie. -Roy Blount Jr  

Concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh, there’s nothing you can’t do, now you’re in New York. -Jay-Z

The city is an amusement park: Everything is concrete, it’s full of tourists, and food vendors line the sidewalks. It’s like living in a casino: The lights never dim, there’s an incessant din of bells and horns, and there’s always someone, somewhere, crying in a bathroom. -Jane Borden      

There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die. -Walt Whitman    

Images: Kevin Dooley, laverrue, Ludovic Bertron, joiseyshowaa, Genaro

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