I don’t know what to do about him, Sammy.” (Jackie)”It’s not what you do about him. It’s what you do with him. Grab him by those big, manly arms that I’m assuming he has, and...

Human beings shouldn’t have to enter such doors, shouldn’t have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave...

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.

I guess it goes to show that you just never know where life will take you. You search for answers. You wonder what it all means. You stumble, and you soar. And, if you’re lucky,...

Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in...

I once believed soft, warm, beautiful things could never flourish in an environment of hard concrete and cold, dark bricks.

Every day in New York City is a test. Work hard and pass this test, you get a chocolate cookie. From a strange man on the subway. A man without pants.

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would...

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how...

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...

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding...

You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe...

I’m in love with New York. It matches my mood. I’m not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the...

Harlem sleeps late.

[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe,...

Everyone in New York City thinks they are famous without being famous.

A city full of eight million people. It was all rather lonely sometimes.

And you can do far more for us from America than you can from here, where you’re just another defenseless Christian. So if you really want to help, Inas, then you’ll go to the very...

She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

Xingu!” she scoffed. “Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough...

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He’s this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot...

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn’t) ‘if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”,...

They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses...

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...

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...

From New Delhi to New York, from Durban to Rio; women andgirls are been hunted down by rapists, abused by pedophiles andemotionally decapitated by a society that is becoming increasinglyhostile to the womenfolk

Honest dishonesty. That’s quite the oxymoron – but I like the originality that you’ve brought to bear in the art of rationalization. Maybe you should consider becoming a lawyer,” he added jokingly.

In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed dreams have died and yet other dreams are being born into squalor and poverty, an uphill climb. It gives a slap...

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp (partly because I was far...

To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city’s mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I...

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna,...

Next time — we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren!

Isn’t it better just to make your own money, and then spend it how and when you want, and with dignity?

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...

New York este un oraș înfricoșător. Milioane de oameni se luptă bărbătește pentru viața lor. E un oraș cu prea mulți bani. Prea mulți la unii și prea puțini la alții. Și lucrul acesta aruncă...

{Yogananda on the death of his dear friend, the eminent 20th century scientist, Luther Burbank}His heart was fathomlessly deep, long acquainted with humility, patience, sacrifice. His little home amid the roses was austerely simple; he...

One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has...

I don’t hate it here,” she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she’d been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. “It’s just that I don’t belong here.”He...

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

New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing...

There is a little bit of everybody in everybody.

But despite these and many other differences, Evan and Heeb had become close friends – an improbability that could have been produced only by the even greater improbabilities that brought them together.

I will Basquiat the canvas of your body like a Broadway Junction wall…and Gordon Parks you for those dark midnights when your scent fades.

Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel...

On the Bowery, in the ornate carcass of a formerly grand vaudeville theater, a dance marathon limps along. The contestants, young girls and their fellas, hold one another up, determined to make their mark, to...

Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as ‘the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.’ But the main problem, alas,...

It’s New York, people. It’s winter. We get snow. If you aren’t preparedto deal with it, move to Miami.