So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any...

I waited in vain for someone like me to stand up and say that the only thing those of us who don’t believe in god have to believe is in other people and that New...

Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.

I want to feel like I’m making a difference in this world. And I want some time for living rather than just working. Life is for living, isn’t it? It can’t be all just for...

The city was different back then–poor and crumbling–kept alive only by the gritty determination and steely cynicism of its occupants. But underneath the dirt was the apple-cheeked optimism of possibility, and while she worked, the...

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm?Why don’t you stay sober today?We didn’t come to New York to stay sober.

For all the energy directed toward the stratagem of big city living, New Yorkers are never too distracted to respond to, and more often, proactively assist visitors. Tourists tracing the routes of subway maps with...

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas...

The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation that five times the population of any other portion of the country.

Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don’t want to go home in the dark.

Real, but sometimes beautiful.

New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.

The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. It doesn’t matter if you are younger or old. Reading our rich history makes the...

Everything good in New York used to be something awful, I guess.””And everything awful used to be something good.

Not even a cat was out. The rain surged down with a steady drone. It meant to harm New York and everyone there. The gutters could not contain it. Long ago they had despaired of...

You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what...

If you’ve broken any promises you’ve made to yourself, now is the time to make up for it.

If it’s true we only live once, then raise your red velvet curtain every chance you get.

It’s a city where everbody mutinies but no one deserts.

I had always been warned that American didn’t always get sarcasm

I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I...

The woman was Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of fashion and legendary fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue. Dana paused, eyes wide. Well, perhaps she was a bit star-struck after all.

There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

I remember looking out the window of the little maid’s room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There’s New York, this...

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up

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.

No matter how many strikes are hurled at you, only you decide when you’re out.

VISIONS OF GRANDEURI’m walking through a sheet of glass instead of the door,Flying over a giant candlestick lighting up Central Park,Repeating two courses at Hard Knock’s College,And swimming through the Red Sea with silky jelly...

If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek’s Hermes, the Roman’s Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of...

But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions...

Skyscraper National Park

While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for New York City.

Aren’t 3,000 lives worth a miracle to a good and all-powerful god?

I moved to New York City for my health. I’m paranoid and it was the only place where my fears were justified.

You want proof evolution is for real, don’t waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship’s cargo hold. Only the survivors...

On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.

Manhattan was a no-man’s land, empty, an unofficial demilitarized zone between Partials and the human survivors. No one was supposed to be here, not because it was forbidden but because it was dangerous. If something...

By necessity, we are direct and swift in speech and movement. This is the true dynamic that underlies our apocryphal rudeness. Also true: we do not make eye contact. Neither do we encourage it. Consider...

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.

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...

It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.

The city that never sleeps (Damon to Elena S4)

In a supersonic jet, you’ll land before you take off. Your watch – if it’s working right – will go back. (It’ll stop if it’s not). You’ve made a journey forwards and backwards at the...

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat...

Fuck the Bureau! Their entire outfit is half the size of the NYPD. I’ve got more officers who speak Arabic in one precinct that you guys have in the entire D.O.D.!

Vulgar of manner, overfed,Overdressed and underbred;Heartless, Godless, hell’s delight,Rude by day and lewd by night…Crazed with avarice, lust and rum,New York, thy name’s delirium.

New York: A third-rate Babylon.