New York lesson 1 – never look lost. Lesson 2 – forget hallowed silences. It’s the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.

New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the...

You can do what you like, sir, but I’ll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.

Stay open. You may find your tribe where you least expect it.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

On a New York subway you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing.

The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed:...

Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and...

Well why don’t you lean over this counter a little more and give me your best kiss, and then I’ll tell you if I want you to take me out to dinner.

Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.

That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as...

Waiting for a hot pocket to cook we’d fuck and be satisfied, barefoot on new york city apartment linoleum. A satisfying hot pocket and a big ass smile and a tight ass grip and a...

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...

Though I have not lived in New York City for more than two decades, these storytellers – from the United States, Britain and Canada – have touched my heart with their openness, inspired me with...

If “Sex and the City” taught us anything, it’s that Paris is the only city in the world that New Yorkers actually fantasize about.

When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere.

Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.

When its 100 degrees in New York, it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it’s still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York,...

People don’t dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container...

New York always feels more like my hometown than the places where I actually grew up (which weren’t far from New York), perhaps because I did my artistic “growing up” while working in this crazy,...

I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn’t understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the...

You haven’t lived until you died in New York.

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.

Be who you are. You may not always please but you will never go wrong.

Want more fizz in your life? Shake things up.

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the...

Chance is life’s only certainty.

There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden...

The space she wants has already been promised to Charles of the Ritz.

This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me

The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your...

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of “coffee shops” as they were defined...

New York – that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American

Increase the number of adventures you act on and you’ll lighten the weight of regret.

I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams

The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a...

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

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

The city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and...

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight....

Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step...

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.

Setting that little girl loose in her society would be like putting a fox in with the chickens. (Violet Strange’s detective boss.)

Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now, that may be a bit much for those who don’t come from New York,...

It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you...

Whether you need to make a call or answer one,don’t put your passions on hold.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it’s obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.