60 New York City Quotes

Some people consider New Yorkers arrogant. Yet again, they too accept that New York is the greatest city in the world? Are they even the greatest city in the hemisphere? In the nation? Busy people on the busy streets, freezing in winter, beautiful Christmas, street vendors, skyline, concerts, museums, amazing theaters, cuisines from all around the world, and close get a way location activities and nature. What some well known figures from history and today think about New York? Here you are we put together 60 best quotes about New York City for you. Take a look at and share with your family and friends.

1- “Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.” – Mark Twain

2- “I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.” – Dylan Thomas

3- “Give me such shows — give me the streets of Manhattan!” – Walt Whitman

4- “New York now leads the world’s great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn’t make a sudden move.” – David Letterman

5- “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

6- “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

7- “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

8- “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, Nobel Prize-winner in literature

9- “I love New York City. The reason I live in New York City is because it’s the loudest city on the planet Earth. It’s so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that’s going on in my own head. It’s really loud. They literally have guys come with jackhammers and they drill the streets and just leave cones in front of your apartment; you don’t even know why. Garbage men come; they don’t pick up the garbage, they just bang the cans together.” – Lewis Black

10- “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” – Tom Wolfe

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

12- “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 beauty in the world.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

13- “I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later — because I did not belong there, did not come from there — but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.” – Joan Didion

14- “My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.” – Walter Kirn

15- “New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.” – Djuna Barnes

16- “I love New York City; I’ve got a gun.” – Charles Barkley

17- “New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty!” – Salvador Dalí

18- “Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.” – Mark Twain

19- “Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.” – James Baldwin

20- “Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.” – Angela Carter

21- “The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remark ably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City… It is not supposed to have existed.” – George Chauncey

22- “It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.” Joan Didion

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

24- “New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabilizer…. In New York I h ave always felt lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which brings on crime, sex, alcohol and other madnesses.” – Henry Miller

25- “And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there…. Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.” – Ezra Pound

26- “There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.” – Simone Beauvoir

27- “In New York you’ve got to have all the luck.” – Charles Bukowski

28- “Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.” – Johnny Carson

29- “There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die.” – Walt Whitman

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

31- “Most of my friends in New York are single women or gay men.” – Sarah Jessica Parker

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

33- “For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.” – Karl Lagerfeld

34- “In terms of theater, there’s not a more supportive theater community than in New York. It’s really kind of a real thrill to go there. I mean, don’t forget, I’m a boy from the suburbs of Sydney, so getting to New York is a huge, huge thrill.” – Hugh Jackman

35- “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, writer, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

36- “The glamour of it all! New York! America!” – Charlie Chaplin

37- “I get out of the taxi and it’s probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York.” – Milos Forman

38- “I was a girly-girl until I moved to New York. Then I got really into the androgynous look of the early-’90s club scene. I had really short hair and started blurring the line a bit. But for me, grade school was about Benetton, Esprit, and Guess jeans.” – Chloë Sevigny

39- “New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed… a race for rent.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

40- “I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, “There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.” – Robert De Niro

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

42- “One of the big things I miss about New York is not my friends so much; it’s Shake Shack, the burger place. I miss Shake Shack.” – Aziz Ansari

43- “One’s life and passion may be elsewhere, but New York is where you prove if what you think in theory makes sense in life.” – Miuccia Prada

44- “People in New York love having roof parties.” – Todd Barry

45- “There’s something so romantic about being broke in New York. You gotta do it. You have to live there once without any money, and then you have to live there when you have money. Let me tell you, of the two, the latter is far better.” – Amy Poehler

46- “When I’m in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing, like I’m in a movie.” – Ryan Adams

47- “New York ladies all look immaculate.” – Zac Posen

48- “I didn’t know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.” – Greta Gerwig

49- “I can’t with any conscience argue for New York with anyone. It’s like Calcutta. But I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they’re a drunk or a thief. I’ve loved the city my whole life — to me, it’s like a great woman.” – Woody Allen

50- “But if I had to choose a single destination where I’d be held captive for the rest of my time in New York, I’d choose the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” – Tim Gunn

51- “My favorite thing about New York is the people, because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are.” – Bill Murray

52- “When it’s 100 degrees in New York, it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When it’s 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, Bronx-born Pulitzer Prize-winner

53- “I came to New York to be a fine artist — that was my ambition.” – David Byrne

54- “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 its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.” – Kurt Vonnegut

55- “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, writer and founding member of the Algonquin Round Table

56- “If Louis was right, and you only get one great love, New York may just be mine. And I can’t have nobody talking shit about my boyfriend.” – Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City – 1998

57- “I don’t like cities. But I like New York. Other places make me feel like a dork.” – Madonna

58- “Even if it ain’t all it seems, I got a pocketful of dreams. Baby I’m from New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of. There’s nothing you can’t do. Now you’re in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you. Hear it for New York, New York, New York.” –  Alicia Keys, Empire State of Mind

59- “Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now that may be a bit much for those who don’t come from New York, but clearly we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advances.” – David Dinkins, mayor of NYC 1990-1993

60 – “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, The Fountainhead

61 – “Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.” – Dorothy Parker

62 – “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

63- “One of my favorite places in the world! Sun shining, ducks quaking and boats rowing.” – at Central Park.

64- “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” – Tennessee Williams

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