143 New York City Quotes

Whether you're a local New Yorker, a frequent visitor, or someone who dreams of wandering through its iconic streets, New York City has an undeniable allure that captures the imagination. From its vibrant culture and towering skyscrapers to the eclectic mix of people and endless opportunities, the city has inspired countless memorable quotes. Dive into our specially curated collection of the top 143 New York City quotes that encapsulate the spirit, energy, and magic of the Big Apple. Prepare to be inspired, amused, and moved by words that perfectly capture the essence of this remarkable metropolis.

1. “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

2. “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 sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.” - Ayn Rand

3. “One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either.” - Terry Pratchett

4. “I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.” - Truman Capote

5. “What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?” - P.G. Wodehouse

6. “Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.” - Dorothy Parker

7. “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” - John Updike

8. “Chapter 1.He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion...no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yeah. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.'Uh, no let me start this over.'Chapter 1.He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles...'. Ah, corny, too corny for my taste. Can we ... can we try and make it more profound?'Chapter 1.He adored New York City. For him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in...'No, that's going to be too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here.'Chapter 1.He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage...'Too angry, I don't want to be angry.'Chapter 1.He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.'I love this.'New York was his town, and it always would be.” - Woody Allen

9. “new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.” - E.B. White

10. “New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.” - Bob Dylan

11. “It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.” - Maeve Brennan

12. “Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.” - Joseph O'Neill

13. “The safest day at the Melody is St. Paddy's," adds another Mardi Gras girl. "All the cops are out vomiting at the parade.” - Josh Alan Friedman

14. “One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.” - colum mccann

15. “You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.” - COLSON WHITEHEAD

16. “Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” - Nora Ephron

17. “I hate Brooklyn.” - Cassandra Clare

18. “Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.” - Jonathan Franzen

19. “...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.” - Evelyn Waugh

20. “He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.” - Arthur Phillips

21. “It is at least as possible for a Philadelphian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and Becket. Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.” - G.K. Chesterton

22. “Sure.” Olivia smirked. “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.” - Cheyenne McCray

23. “It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan. Customers quitting the island for Astoria or Cobble Hill would claim to welcome the change of pace, saying it would be nice to finally have a garden or live a little closer to the airport. They’d put a good face one it, but one could always detect an underlying sense of defeat. The apartments might be bigger and cheaper in other places, but one could never count on their old circle of friend making the long trip to attend a birthday party. Even Washington Heights was considered a stretch. People referred to it as Upstate New York, though it was right there in Manhattan.” - David Sedaris

24. “I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.” - Rick Riordan

25. “"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 experience more layered, but it is not a substitute for walking the streets themselves. For old-timer or newcomer, it is essential to absorb the city as it is now in order to shape your own nostalgias. That's why I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city's magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man. Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the place to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it's your tribe too, no matter where you were born. Listen to its music and its legends. Gaze at its ruins and monuments. Walk its sidewalks and run fingers upon the stone and bricks and steel of our right-angled streets. Breathe the air of the river breeze."” - Pete Hamill

26. “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.” - Joseph O'Neill

27. “That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.” - Andrew Vachss

28. “Of course, in Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car.” - George Carlin

29. “The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years.” - Philip Hone

30. “New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.” - Peter Cameron

31. “New York City, city of exaggerations. Place of Herculean ascensions and perilous falls.” - Kurt Wenzel

32. “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 got to breed, and they’ve been improving with every new litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn’t be the first island they took over.” - Andrew Vachss

33. “Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.” - Willa Cather

34. “I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me onto the stage where it's so bright and so dark at the same time, just knowing there are three thousand people out there longing to be swept away by the passion that's about to flood out from scarlet curtains, to this I consecrate my body and my soul, I can give no more than all of myself, I feel my heart is a throbbing engine and my voice is the valve, like a wailing train, it has to sing or blow up, there's too much fuel, too much fire, and what am I to do with this voice if I can't let it out, it's not just singing. I am here as a speck, but I don't feel scared or about to be blown away, I feel like all New York is a warm embrace just waiting to enfold me. I am in love. But not with a person. I am passionately in love with my life.” - Ann-Marie MacDonald

35. “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, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.” - Richard Price

36. “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 supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.” - Kurt Vonnegut

37. “Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.” - Teju Cole

38. “New York loves expanse. It grows upward and spreads its tentacles outward, the island spilling into adjoining lands through its many bridges and tunnels. A person given to idleness, as Parvis has come to think of himself, must move about for the sake of moving, if only to fit into the general scheme of things - an electron obeying the current. Tantamount to movement, he has come to realize, is self-reliance, a fact reflected in the language: "Take care," a friend may say to another as the two part. In his old life the same two friends would have said to one another, khodahfez - "may God protect you.” - Dalia Sofer

39. “A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I'd die for my fans.” - Lady Gaga

40. “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 it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.” - John Steinbeck

41. “I had always been warned that American didn't always get sarcasm” - Lindsey Kelk

42. “I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists] live.Where's that?Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there.” - John McCain

43. “I once started outto walk around the worldbut ended up in Brooklyn,that Bridge was too much for me.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

44. “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 ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in Moscow or Beijing or Baghdad or Kabul. People risk their lives to come here---to New York. The greatest city in the world, where dreams become reality.” - Sean Hannity

45. “The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.” - Moss Hart

46. “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: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in a way I had never experienced, to live out His peace amid whirling chaos. (p.67)” - Tara Leigh Cobble

47. “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 brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.” - Henry James

48. “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 flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history.” - Henry James

49. “Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.” - Henry James

50. “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 them into flickering constellations of light. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to the image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.” - Melissa Febos

51. “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 whole city seemed to throb along with her.” - Candace Bushnell

52. “The city is the size of a country, but has been operated like a candy store.” - Ed Koch

53. “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.” - Malcolm S. Forbes

54. “Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.” - Ed Koch

55. “The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.” - Frank Rich

56. “There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.” - Elbert Hubbard

57. “You haven't lived until you died in New York.” - Alexander Woollcott

58. “Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.” - Robert Benchley

59. “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 fullest expression of our modern age.” - Leon Trotsky

60. “My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad; but New York City?” - Henny Youngman

61. “New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.” - Anna Quindlen

62. “The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.” - Ed Koch

63. “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 .” - Spalding Gray

64. “No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.” - Michael Bloomberg

65. “New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.” - Léopold Sédar Senghor

66. “You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.” - Jonathan Lethem

67. “Skyscraper National Park” - Kurt Vonnegut

68. “Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough” - John Steinbeck

69. “New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.” - Truman Capote

70. “New York is the place where everyone will stop a championship fight to look at an usher giving a drunk the bum's rush.” - Damon Runyon

71. “To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.” - H.G. Wells

72. “Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.” - Kenneth Tynan

73. “Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.” - Irwin Shaw

74. “New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.” - Russell Baker

75. “Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.” - Robert Moses

76. “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 where it's happening.” - John Lennon

77. “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 thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone?” - Herman Melville

78. “From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

79. “Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does” - Groucho Marx

80. “I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and it was the only place where my fears were justified.” - anita weiss

81. “In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?” - Mark Twain

82. “Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.” - Marilyn Vos Savant

83. “New York, the nation's thyroid gland.” - Christopher Morley

84. “New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American” - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

85. “Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.” - Irving Berlin

86. “East Side, West Side, all around the town,The tots sang "Ring-a-rosie, London Bridge is falling Down;Boys and Girls together, me and Mamie O'Rorke, Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.” - james w. blake

87. “If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish” - Lennie Bruce

88. “As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.” - Pearl S. Buck

89. “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 be unable to read” - G.K. Chesterton

90. “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 rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.” - Theodore Dreiser

91. “New York is a sucked orange.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

92. “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 the East” - John Gregory Dunne

93. “I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

94. “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.” - Henry Ford

95. “New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.” - Henry James

96. “New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.” - Thomas Jefferson

97. “A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.” - Le Corbusier

98. “New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City.New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle;Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness….There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory inTheir skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.” - Christopher Morley

99. “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 its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward.” - Willie Morris

100. “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.” - Byron Rufus Newton

101. “It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.” - O. Henry

102. “When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.” - Neil Simon

103. “If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.” - Arthur C. Clarke

104. “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 people and crossing of borders, imagination.” - James Hillman

105. “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 under the folds of her wide garments--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.” - James Weldon Johnson

106. “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

107. “No other place can so convincingly claim to be the capital of capitalism, the capital of the 20th century and the capital of the world.” - Kenneth T. Jackson

108. “On a New York subway you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing.” - Lewis Grizzard

109. “Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence?” - Walt Whitman

110. “The Bronx? No Thonx!” - Ogden Nash

111. “The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” - E.B. White

112. “The Empire State, a lonely dinosaur, rose sadly at midtown, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor airships, alas.” - Vincent Scully

113. “Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.” - O. Henry

114. “New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.” - Saul Bellow

115. “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.” - Fran Lebowitz

116. “People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.” - Lindsey Kelk

117. “You cannot keep something down that is bound to rise.” - Juliet C. Obodo

118. “It is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest how is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.” - Anna Godbersen

119. “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.” - Edward Conlon

120. “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 looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.” - Jim Butcher

121. “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.” - Jim Butcher

122. “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 them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.” - Charles Whibley

123. “Chance is life's only certainty.” - Mickey Wyte

124. “Having grown up here, I always wonder what it would be like to see this city as a tourist. Is it ever a disappointment? I have to believe that New York always lives up to its reputation. The buildings really are that tall. The lights really are that bright. There's truly a story on every corner. But it still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions. To not feel the bright lights even as they fill the air. To see the tall buildings and only feel a deep longing for the stars.” - David Levithan

125. “Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel yarns for my supper.” - O. Henry

126. “Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.” - O. Henry

127. “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.” - Dorothy Parker

128. “It wasn’t so much that I thought there was nowhere to go, in this huge city; but with so many places to go, where were you supposed to begin?” - Kelly Braffet

129. “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 tapes. In some neighborhoods, it’s a must.” - Isabel Lopez

130. “We played this game from the west village to the upper east side til around midnight when the Chrysler building was far behind us and we weren’t sure if we were in love anymore.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

131. “Waiting for a hot pocket to cook we’d fuck and be satisfied, barefoot on new york city apartment linoleum. A satisfying hot pocket and a big ass smile and a tight ass grip and a wall beside a random pipe beside the stove where we left palm and dick prints. We fucked like this. Three condoms in an hour and a half and where are you now? Holding the hand of some local dude you wish was a little more international, wishing you had known I was enough and asked me to stay. You are standing in the kitchen waiting for popcorn to pop while he washes dishes, not knowing I’m wishing back for you.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

132. “In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.” - Anna Quindlen

133. “It cannot be done all at once. To overpower vertigo - the keeper of the abyss- one must tame it, cautiously.” - Philippe Petit

134. “That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.” - Amor Towles

135. “Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.” - T.A

136. “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 due.” - Amor Towles

137. “The pulse of New York City can be found on the bent elbows of the patrons in Pete's Tavern.” - Mickey Wyte

138. “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 those who are coming here for me tonight. We're going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.("New York Blues")” - Cornell Woolrich

139. “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 for dying.("New York Blues")” - Cornell Woolrich

140. “Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in.The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground.Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again.Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get.This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here.("New York Blues")” - Cornell Woolrich

141. “In New York, the buildings are like mountains in some ways, but they are only alive because of the people living in them. Real mountains are alive all over.” - Silas House

142. “She loved the way her city always sounded like it was celebrating.” - Sarah Pekkanen

143. “It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.” - Iain M. Banks