Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its...

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon...

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

Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.

New York. The world’s most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it...

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

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...

I’m bound to say that New York’s a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I’m a wealthy bird,...

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

I knew I couldn’t live in America and I wasn’t ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America – New York City .

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests’ worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development...

In some neighborhoods, faces mature faster than bodies.

These were the new girls of New York- complete with rapid heartbeats from too much nicotine and coffee. They were nervous and fluttery but completely alluring- the new face of urban femininity.

New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked hands and feet...

Whether by plane, bus or carpet, own the magic in your ride.

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a...

Hell’s bells, Susan, you don’t know what you’ve done. You’ve got to get outof here.”She snorted. “Like hell.””I mean it,” I said. “You’re in danger.””Relax, Harry. I’m not letting anyone lick me, and I’m not...

Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough

To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Polonius, you sometimes have to get your hands a little dirty to set things straight.

It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with...

You are an exceedingly beautiful mystery, one that intrigues me and one that I plan to solve.

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...

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

Never mind gas masks and fallout shelters in the event of biological warfare. Many New Yorkers move from place to place equipped with the essentials of vermin assault weaponry: mouse traps, roach spray, and sticky...

An unlimited supply of wonder and trust, bolsters life lived as a process of discovery.

Good ol’ New York Public Library. I’m sure it’s up to date on the latest Demons that escape through well-guarded Demon Gates.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does

You might find me cleverly clad, in black on black, at 28th and 7th Ave.

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is...

There were a few nighttime pedestrians on the block, but they continued on their way, dutifully ignoring the zombie vomiting blood out of the back of my car. Good old New Yorkers. They really couldn’t...

The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the...

Summer sticks to her skirt sumptuously, in the shiny gray fabric hanging loosely from her curves. Her chestnut eyes, apparently hidden from strangers; her simple but graceful face, unpainted by Madison Avenue; and her straight...

If you think you’ll find intellectual stimulation, you’re thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I’ve never been more bored by casual chat.

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.

Situated on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap...

Endings are the embryos of new beginnings.

The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out – everybody but me, everybody but...

people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they’re invited to step into.

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the...

New York is a granite beehive, where people jostle and whir like molecules in an overheated jar. Houston is six suburbs in search of a center.

And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one’s wildest hopes, protector of one’s deepest privacies. It was half insane with...

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

She now saw that she wanted a boy to do more than follow her in blind devotion. She wanted a boy to challenge her, to tell her about things she’d never thought of, to show...

Is a newspaper prints a sex crime, it’s smut, but when The New York Times prints it, it’s a sociological study.[Adolph S. Ochs – Publisher New York Times]

New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.

If you want it badly enough, it’s yours.

Keep moving. Your next big thing may be just around the corner.

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red...

New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.