93 New York City Quotes

New York City, a metropolis brimming with energy, creativity, and endless possibility, has long captivated the hearts and minds of people around the world. From its iconic skyline to its bustling streets, the Big Apple is the muse for countless writers, thinkers, and dreamers. In this blog post, we've meticulously curated a collection of the top 93 quotes that encapsulate the essence of New York City. Whether you're a native New Yorker, a frequent visitor, or simply a fan dreaming of your first trip, these quotes will transport you straight to the heart of this vibrant city. Join us as we explore perspectives, memories, and reflections that celebrate what makes New York City truly extraordinary.

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. “Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.” - Helen Keller

3. “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

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. “If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.” - Peter Shaffer

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

7. “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?” - Woody Allen

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

9. “This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me” - Walt Whitman

10. “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

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

12. “But what Dakota most enjoyed about the beginning of winter was the crispness of the air (that practically demanded the wearing of knits) and the way that tough New Yorkers - on the street, in elevators, in subways - were suddenly willing to risk a smile. To make a connection with a stranger. To finally see one another after strenuously avoiding eye contact all year.” - Kate Jacobs

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. “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

15. “I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.” - colum mccann

16. “New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.” - Henry Miller

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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, so everything was fine.” - P.G. Wodehouse

20. “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

21. “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

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

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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

30. “New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something” - Lindsey Kelk

31. “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

32. “Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.” - O. Henry

33. “Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.” - Ann Douglas

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.” - O. Henry

38. “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

39. “New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillac's, and the beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses.” - Duke Ellington

40. “If one is looking for cultural testosterone and raging off-the-wall competition in the world of communications, Manhattan was - and is - home plate.” - Brock Yates

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

42. “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

43. “New York - The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say "These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.” - Robert Benchley

44. “Is a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when The New York Times prints it, it's a sociological study.[Adolph S. Ochs - Publisher New York Times]” - Adolph S. Ochs

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

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

47. “It's a city where everbody mutinies but no one deserts.” - Harry Hershfield

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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

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

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

53. “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

54. “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

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

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

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

58. “Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.” - Albert Camus

59. “New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.” - Alistair Cooke

60. “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

61. “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.” - Ford Madox Ford

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

63. “My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.” - Henry Miller

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

68. “Situated on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.- Frances Trollope (1827)” - Frances Trollope

69. “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

70. “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

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

72. “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

73. “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

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

75. “New York: A third-rate Babylon.” - H.L. Mencken

76. “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

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

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

79. “But it wasn't the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn't feel any passion to write about the place. I didn't give a damn about local politics; I wasn't moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world was a centre and that centre was here. ‘The world's a sphere, everyone,’ I wanted to say. ‘The centre of a sphere doesn't lie on its surface. Look up the word 'superficial', when you have a chance.” - Mohsin Hamid

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “Jason woke to a feeling of fear, borne from a dream that he couldn’t remember when waking. But as his mind focused, he found the dream right before him. The half-woman lay perfectly molded against his body, her wings draped down her back.” - Derendrea

84. “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

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

86. “That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weather wane - or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.” - Amor Towles

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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.” - Amor Towles

91. “[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, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors!” - Tom Wolfe

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

93. “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