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

To people from ‘Brooklyn-Brooklyn’ North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.

I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. (“Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds”)

{…]I began to feel tears of frustration build up in my eyes, yearning to free themselves from their glandular prisons.

What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are...

I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend’s a Puerto Rican,...

Money is the petrol of life.

Ten years have passed and every day that I walk throughout the city, I feel honored to be a part of it – and atom in the blood of a beating heart belonging to the...

At one point, I began to think that I had a divine doorman. Lenny was the most unlikely incarnation of God I could imagine, and yet, I kept drifting irresistibly towards this absurd conclusion. Despite...

when we’re done, I’ll be where the night never stopscradling a bruise that’s shaped like youwondering why sleep never came to mewondering how I still dreamed

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

I had always been an atheist until I met Lenny. He was too wonderously complex and good for there to be no benevolent and intelligent force behind our marvelous cosmos. Lenny gave me the actual...

That’s how quickly New York City comes about – like a weather wane – or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.

Royal Young has accomplished a rare feat in his fresh and riveting debut: he manages to recount his fascinating youth and unconventional family with a mixture of humor, scathing honesty and tenderness. Much more than...

Oh no. I’m not gonna let you leave yet. I’m gonna show you the value of takin’ your time to get to work. I probably should have done this a long time ago.

This is the story of an electrically alive young woman on the brink of her adult life. An artist equally attuned to the light as the shadows, with a limitless hunger for experience and knowledge,...

I don’t know who you are,” she thought, “but whoever you are, you’re one hell of a player.

We pick the people who populate our personal lives as much for who they make us as for who they are. I chose Anna for the person I became in her presence, and in this...

now that the recalcitrant forsythia has at last decided to come and blurt out springtime in petalled fountains of yellow. In spite of reams of papers to be written, life has snitched a cocaine sniff...

Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume...

ERIC: What are you always writin’ in that book anyway?RODNEY: Poetry.TYRONE: Poetry?Rodney stops sketching and sentimentally flips through a few dozen pages of sketches and handwritten poems and notes.RODNEY: Poetry and pictures. Snapshots of our...

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

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:...

On a clear day I can see NYC. I just have to turn on the TV.

Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine’s riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of...

It was a brave city, she decided, eyeing them. Brave in its other sense; not courageous, so much as outstanding, commanding. It was too nice a town to die in. Though it had no honeysuckle...

New York had saved him, in a very real way. It had pushed and prodded him with its impatient and sharp fingers, reminding him on a daily basis during that jittery first year that it...

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.

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...