New York Quotes

New York is where you can get the best cheap meal and the lousiest expensive meal in the country.

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfil him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.

New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience – if they did they would live elsewhere.

The city is like poetry: it compresses all life into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!

New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression. The Empire Stare Building […]

More and more too, the old name absorbs into me – Mannahatta, ‘the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.’ How fit a name for America’s great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, […]

From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation.

I had to move to New York for health reasons. I’m very paranoid and New York is the only place where my fears are justified.