Fear not your flame as you flood your caverns with firelight.

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

I mean it,” I said. “You’re in danger.””Relax, Harry. I’m not letting anyone lick me, and I’m not looking anyone in the eyes. It’s kind of like visiting New York.

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about...

As she looked in the full-length mirror in her dressing room, she added a few ropes of pearls, pinned a white silk camellia, and draped the Chantilly lace shawl. In that moment, Dana thought of...

In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and...

He had an overwhelming urge to take possession of her lips, silencing any mention of another man’s name.

New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.

What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of...

The city is the size of a country, but has been operated like a candy store.

No need to queue up; step forward and count yourself in.

Experiment with grounding yourself with who you are, not what you do.

When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : “What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to...

Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned...

Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.

She loved the way her city always sounded like it was celebrating.

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high,...

When you look for beauty, you usually end up finding it.From Central Park Song (A Screenplay)

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...